Transcendental Heidegger

Transcendental Heidegger

Steven CrowellJeff Malpas

Editors

Stanford University Press

transcendental heidegger

Transcendental Heidegger

Edited bysteven crowell

and jeff malpas

Stanford University PressStanford, California

2007

Stanford University PressStanford, California

© 2007 by the Board of Trustees of theLeland Stanford Junior University.All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Transcendental Heidegger / edited by Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.isbn 978-0-8047-5510-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-8047-5511-5

(pbk. : alk. paper)1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976—Congresses. 2. Transcendentalism—Congresses. I. Crowell, Steven Galt. II. Malpas, J. E.

b3279.h49t635 2007193—dc22 2006100035

Typeset by Classic Typography in 10.5 ⁄ 12 Bembo

Contents

Contributors vii

1. Introduction:Transcendental HeideggerSteven Crowell and Jeff Malpas 1

2. Ontology, the A Priori, and the Primacy of Practice:An Aporia in Heidegger’s Early PhilosophyWilliam Blattner 10

3. Heidegger on Kant on TranscendenceDavid Carr 28

4. Conscience and Reason: Heidegger and the Grounds of IntentionalitySteven Crowell 43

5. Transcendental Truth and the Truth That PrevailsDaniel O. Dahlstrom 63

6. The Descent of the Logos: Limits of TranscendentalReflectionKarsten Harries 74

7. Letting BeJohn Haugeland 93

8. Heidegger and the Synthetic A PrioriCristina Lafont 104

9. Heidegger’s Topology of BeingJeff Malpas 119

10. Heidegger’s Transcendental Phenomenology in the Light of Husserl’s Project of First PhilosophyDermot Moran 135

11. The “I Think” and the For-the-Sake-of-WhichMark Okrent 151

12. Heidegger’s “Scandal of Philosophy”:The Problem of theDing an sich in Being and TimeHerman Philipse 169

13. Necessary Conditions for the Possibility of What Isn’t:Heidegger on Failed MeaningRobert B. Pippin 199

14. Projection and Purposiveness: Heidegger’s Kant and theTemporalization of JudgmentRachel Zuckert 215

Notes 235

Bibliography 285

Index 297

vi Contents

Contributors

william blattner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at GeorgetownUniversity and the author of Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (1999), as well asarticles on Heidegger, Kant, and Dewey. He is also a devoted fan of theWashington Nationals.

david carr is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Philosophy at EmoryUniversity. He is the translator of Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciencesand Transcendental Phenomenology:An Introduction to Phenomenological Philoso-phy (1970); and the author of Phenomenology and the Problem of History (1974),Time, Narrative, and History (1986), Interpreting Husserl (1987), The Paradox ofSubjectivity (1999), and of essays on phenomenology, Husserl, and the philos-ophy of history.

steven crowell is Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Philoso-phy, and Professor of German Studies, at Rice University. He is the authorof Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phe-nomenology (2001), and editor of The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays inHonor of Maurice Natanson (1995).With Burt Hopkins, he edits The New Year-book for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy.

daniel o. dahlstrom, Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, is theauthor of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (2001), and the translator of Heideg-ger’s first Marburg lectures, Introduction to Phenomenological Research (2005).His article, “Heidegger’s Transcendentalism,” can be found in Research inPhenomenology (2005).

karsten harries was born in Jena, Germany, and trained at Yale Univer-sity, where he has taught since 1961, interrupted only by two years as an as-sistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin (1963–65) and severalyears spent in Germany. He is the author of more than 170 articles and re-views and five books: The Meaning of Modern Art (1968), The Bavarian RococoChurch: Between Faith and Aestheticism (1983), The Broken Frame:Three Lectures

viii Contribut0rs

(1990), The Ethical Function of Architecture (1997; winner of the American In-stitute of Architects Eighth Annual International Architecture Book Awardfor Criticism), and Infinity and Perspective (2001).

john haugeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University Chicago. Hisresearch focuses mainly on the early Heidegger, the metaphysics of truth,the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of mind. He is the author ofArtificial Intelligence:The Very Idea (1985), and Having Thought: Essays in theMetaphysics of Mind (1998); the editor of Mind Design (1981) and Mind De-sign II (1997); and coeditor, with James Conant, of The Road Since Structure(2000).

cristina lafont is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University.She is the author of The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy (1999) andHeidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure (2000). Some of her recent articlesinclude:“Heidegger’s Hermeneutics,” in The Blackwell Companion to Heidegger(2005); “Was Heidegger an Externalist?” Inquiry (2005); “Précis of Heidegger,Language, and World-Disclosure” and “Replies,” Inquiry (2002); “The Role ofLanguage in Being and Time,” in Heidegger Reexamined: Heidegger and Contem-porary Philosophy (2002).

jeff malpas was born in Sydney, Australia, but grew up in New Zealand.He is a graduate of the University of Auckland and the Australian NationalUniversity. Since 1999, he has been Professor of Philosophy at the Universityof Tasmania. He has been a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University ofHeidelberg and Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich. His work encom-passes both the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition, especially Heideg-ger and Gadamer, and Anglo-American thought, particularly as centeredaround Davidson and Rorty, and includes research in applied ethics, philo-sophical methodology, and the philosophy of place and space. He is the au-thor of Place and Experience (1999) and of Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place,World (2006), and the editor of Gadamer’s Century (2002), among many otherworks.

dermot moran was born in Dublin and is a graduate of University Col-lege Dublin and Yale University. He is, since 1989, Professor of Philosophyat University College Dublin and Founding Editor of the International Jour-nal of Philosophical Studies. Professor Moran has been Visiting Professor atYale University, Connecticut College, and Rice University, and has taught atQueen’s University Belfast and Maynooth University. He is author of ThePhilosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (1989), Introduction to Phenomenology (2000),and Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (2005). He has edited Husserl,The Shorter Logical Investigations (2001), and The Logical Investigations, 2 vols.,trans. J. N. Findlay (2001); and coedited, with Tim Mooney, The Phenome-

nology Reader (2002), and, with Lester Embree, Phenomenology: Critical Con-cepts, 5 vols. (2004).

mark okrent is Professor of Philosophy at Bates College. His recent pub-lications include essays on Heidegger, Kant, and the relations among inten-tionality, normativity, and teleology. He is the author of Heidegger’s Pragma-tism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics (1988).

herman philipse studied law at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands,and philosophy in Leiden, Oxford, Paris, and Cologne. He was Full Profes-sor of Philosophy at the University of Leiden from 1985 to 2003 and is nowUniversity Professor at the University of Utrecht. He has published widelyon issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion, andon authors such as Descartes, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger. His extensivehistorical and critical analysis of Heidegger’s oeuvre, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being:A Critical Interpretation, was published by Princeton University Pressin 1998.

robert b. pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Pro-fessor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy,and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of severalbooks on German idealism and later German philosophy, including Kant’sTheory of Form (1982), Hegel’s Idealism:The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness(1989), and Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (1997). He also wrote a bookabout literature: Henry James and Modern Moral Life (2000). A collection ofhis recent essays in German, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, appeared in 2005,as did his most recent book, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Af-termath. He is a former Humboldt Fellow, the winner of the Mellon Distin-guished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a Fellowat the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

rachel zuckert is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern Uni-versity. Her publications include “A New Look at Kant’s Theory of Plea-sure,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2002); “Awe or Envy: HerderContra Kant on the Sublime,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2003);“Boring Beauty and Universal Morality: Kant on the Ideal of Beauty,” In-quiry (2005); and Kant on Beauty and Biology:An Interpretation of the “Critiqueof Judgment,” forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Contribut0rs ix

chapter

Introductiontranscendental heidegger

Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas

1

the transcendental is a key notion in Heidegger’s thought. Not onlydoes Heidegger’s early work stand within the framework of transcendentalphenomenology as established by Husserl—even though it also contests andrevises that framework—but that thinking also stands in a close relationshipto the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and specifically to the tran-scendental project, and modes of argument, of Kant’s Critique of Pure Rea-son. Moreover, while the idea of the transcendental is explicitly disavowedin Heidegger’s later thought, there still seems to be an important sense(though one that remains in need of clarification) in which that thinkingretains a broadly “transcendental” character. It is perhaps surprising, then,that more attention has not been paid so far to what may be thought of asthe “transcendental Heidegger”—to the role of the transcendental in Hei-degger’s thinking as well as Heidegger’s stance toward the tradition of tran-scendental thought as such.1 This collection aims to go some way towardremedying this apparent neglect, and to argue for the continuing signifi-cance of the transcendental for understanding Heidegger’s thinking, bothearly and late. In so doing, it also makes a case for the continuing signifi-cance of the transcendental in philosophy more broadly.

Of course, what is meant by the term transcendental is an unavoidable andunderlying issue here. As Heidegger himself uses it, the term is almost al-ways understood in relation to Kant, and to the idea of “transcendence,”which Heidegger—following Husserl in this regard rather more than Kanthimself—takes to lie at the heart of the Kantian critical enterprise: the tran-scendental names that which makes possible the structure of transcendence.

In consequence, the shift away from the transcendental as a key term inHeidegger’s thinking goes hand in hand with a shift away from the focus ontranscendence, and, at the same time, from Kant, as well as from Husserl andthe language of transcendental phenomenology. Basing oneself on Heideg-ger’s overt—and often polemical—self-interpretation, then, one might betempted to find a radical discontinuity between Heidegger’s earlier and laterthinking; indeed, the celebrated “turning” in Heidegger’s thought has beenseen chiefly as a turning away from the transcendental and all that is associ-ated with it.Yet in spite of Heidegger’s adoption of this specific reading ofthe notion, the transcendental is by no means an idea to which there at-taches a simple or settled interpretation. Indeed, ever since Kant’s appropri-ation of the term from the language of scholastic logic and metaphysics, theidea of the transcendental has given rise to discussion and debate—debatethat has often, particularly in Anglo-Saxon philosophical circles, been rathernegatively disposed.2 So while it is obviously important to understand andacknowledge what Heidegger himself says about the transcendental, there isalso a need to interrogate the term in a way that is sensitive to the possibilitythat it may harbor a significance exhausted neither by Heidegger’s explicitusage nor by some of the other interpretations that have circulated aroundit. Could the transcendental refer us, for instance, to a distinctive mode ofnonreductive analysis that aims to analyze phenomena in a way that drawsonly on elements already given in the phenomena as such?3 Although sucha characterization is extremely general, it would seem to conform, in itsgeneral outline, to certain key aspects of the analytic of Dasein in Being andTime as well as the account of the structure of the Fourfold in a late essaysuch as “The Thing.”

How we should understand the idea of the transcendental is a topic thatinforms many of the discussions that appear in this collection, even if it is notalways addressed explicitly. But such a topic can hardly be raised withoutconfronting an extraordinary range of general philosophical issues. We mayintroduce some of the many topics of investigation on offer in the presentvolume by reflecting on three areas in which the transcendental traditionfrom Kant to Husserl gave rise to intense debate: the scope of the transcen-dental question itself; the character of transcendental inquiry; and the appeal tosubjectivity, with its concomitant question of idealism.

1.The Scope of the Transcendental Question

Kant can reasonably be understood as having raised the question of theconditions that make a certain kind of knowledge possible—namely, ratio-nal knowledge that claims to “transcend” what can be given in sense experi-

2 Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas

ence. Perhaps the most well-known feature of Heidegger’s Kant interpreta-tion is his rejection of this “epistemological” reading of Kant; instead he fa-vors the claim that Kant’s enterprise was really an “ontological” one. AsDavid Carr’s contribution to this volume shows, this widening of the scopeof the transcendental question stemmed from Heidegger’s appreciation ofwhat Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology had already accomplished,namely, a “break with the way of ideas,” that is, a break with an understand-ing of intentionality as something that is mediated by mental “representa-tions.”To understand transcendental philosophy essentially as an answer to acertain kind of skepticism (that is, as primarily an epistemological enter-prise) is to remain within the Cartesian framework in which alone such aproblem can arise. Heidegger’s reading of Kant makes explicit the tensionwithin Kant himself between a residual Cartesianism and a new paradigm,in which mind is always in the world and subject and object cannot bethought as separate.

For Heidegger, then, the scope of the transcendental question is not re-stricted to the conditions of cognitive experience, but to all intentionality—all consciousness of something as something—as such. Contributions byMark Okrent and Steven Crowell explore some consequences of thiswidened scope. For Okrent, one of Heidegger’s most important insights isthat the intentionality of judgment rests upon a more basic, “practical” in-tentionality of the sort found in our dealings with tools. Crowell, in turn,argues that Heidegger’s analysis of conscience, in Being and Time, should beunderstood as an account of how the norms inherent in such practical in-tentionality arise in experience. As with all such fundamental issues, thereare disagreements: for Okrent, Heidegger’s argument fails to make clear whyonly entities that have “world” in his sense can intend entities; whereas forCrowell, analysis of conscience—and the practice of reason-giving thatemerges from it—are precisely what clarify this matter.

These treatments of intentionality show that for Heidegger the realscope of the transcendental question is not limited even to intentionality inthe broadest sense, but rather to the “understanding of being” upon whichall directedness toward objects “as” something depends. Indeed, as RobertB. Pippin maintains, if Heidegger’s “question of being” is not to be con-strued as a MacGuffin, we should understand it precisely as a question intothe very possibility of any intelligibility or meaning at all. In his reading ofHeidegger’s reflections on Angst and das Nichts, Pippin argues that what ismost interesting about Heidegger’s account is his claim that meaning canfail, that things can present themselves as wholly lacking in significance. Thisis in contrast to the Hegelian view that a collapse of meaning—a collapse ofa way of looking at the world—can only be part of a dialectical emergence

Introduction 3

of new meaning. But it also, according to Pippin, shows that Heidegger’s in-quiry cannot be truly transcendental in Kant’s sense, since Kantian condi-tions of possibility cannot fail.

This widening of the scope of the transcendental question is carriedforth into Heidegger’s later work, as Jeff Malpas shows in his reconstructionof the traces of “topographical” thinking that are present already in Heideg-ger’s early work but come to full expression in his late reflections on thetopology of being. If the transcendental question concerns the conditionsthat allow entities to come to presence, then Being and Time—in which thispossibility is traced back to the presence of one of those entities, Dasein—might seem to suffer from disabling circularity. But Malpas shows how thelater Heidegger provides a solution by recasting thought as a kind of topo-graphical process, which maps conditions of possibility from within the fieldthey govern, rather than by appealing to some single ultimate ground. Thenotion of the Fourfold, and the emphasis on the way places constellatearound particular things, are thus seen to belong to a kind of transformedtranscendental project.

2.The Character of Transcendental Inquiry

All this gives rise to more questions:What are “conditions of possibility”?How do we discover them? For Kant, the answer is that such conditions in-clude a set of concepts whose a priori application to objects is establishedthrough transcendental arguments—in particular through a transcendentaldeduction.4 Heidegger clearly follows Kant in his idea that what distin-guishes philosophical inquiry from empirical science is its concern with “apriori” conditions of experience, that is, conditions that do not themselvesderive from experience. Equally clearly, however, he rejects Kant’s idea thatthese conditions stem from a faculty of “pure reason.” Rather, their originlies in the temporality of Dasein, toward which Kant is understood to havebeen groping in his treatment of imagination in the first Critique. Further,taking his cue from Husserl’s phenomenological approach, Heidegger fa-mously argued that there is no need for the centerpiece of Kant’s thought,the quaestio juris, the question that a transcendental deduction is supposed toanswer. Rachel Zuckert’s contribution to this volume subjects this chapterin Heidegger’s reading of Kant to close examination. She recognizes that inhis “temporalized” interpretation of the a priori Heidegger is trying tocome to terms with a question that even today continues to trouble Kantscholarship—namely, is synthesis a real psychological activity or a purelylogical condition?—but she criticizes him for sidestepping the problem ofexplaining the application of the categories. Heidegger’s claim that cate-


gories do nothing but make explicit the preconceptual synthesis of imagi-nation, while not as outrageous as some commentators have held, leaves im-portant questions unexplored. Zuckert then argues that Kant himself seemsto have moved closer to Heidegger’s position with late concept of “reflec-tive judgment,” whose principle—“purposiveness”—has a temporal struc-ture that closely resembles Heidegger’s idea of projection. In the end, how-ever, Zuckert finds that Heidegger too easily abandoned the strong claimsfor necessity, which, for Kant, distinguished the categories as something inneed of transcendental inquiry in the first place.

This point is echoed in Cristina Lafont’s treatment of the a priori in Hei-degger. For her, Heidegger’s thought exhibits the “hermeneutic” transfor-mation of Kant’s Copernican revolution that is characteristic of an impor-tant strand of German thought since Wilhelm von Humboldt. Under such ahermeneutic transformation a priori conditions are no longer traced back toa pure transcendental subject but to a merely factic one; they are embedded inthe particular, historical languages that inform Dasein’s “understanding of be-ing.” Heidegger follows Kant in claiming that no access to entities is possibleoutside of such an a priori context (a particular understanding of being),but because his synthetic a priori is merely factic he cannot employ Kant’sargument for this claim, namely, that a particular understanding is necessaryfor all possible experience. Rather than drop the strong notion of the a priori,however, Heidegger embraces an unstable linguistic idealism. Lafont con-trasts such idealism with the “contextual a priori” in Hilary Putnam’s inter-nal realism—a position that, in Heideggerian terms, is purchased at the costof abandoning the ontological difference, the absolute distinction betweenontic (a posteriori) and ontological (a priori) knowledge.

A similar tension is uncovered by William Blattner, who finds Heidegger’snotion of a priori conditions to be caught between two important currentsin his understanding of philosophical inquiry: the pragmatic strand, and theaspirations for a transcendental ontology.The pragmatic strand uncovers con-ditions on meaning—such as skills and capacities—that cannot be capturedin concepts and propositions. The transcendental strand seeks an ultimateground for this sort of “understanding of being” in a theory of original tem-porality. But the transcendental aspiration involves an objectifying conceptualthematization of a priori conditions, which contradicts the very character—preconceptual, resistant to propositional formulation—of these conditions(skills, practices) themselves. Blattner suggests that Heidegger chose to dropthe transcendental idea of a scientific ontology in his later work. But heleaves us with the crucial question regarding the character of philosophicalinquiry:To what extent can philosophical expression be other than concep-tual or theoretical? Is propositionality an obstacle to our access to being?

Introduction 5

Several chapters—for instance, those of Pippin, Carr, and Dermot Moran—take note of the fact that Heidegger’s transcendentalism is a placeholder forthe idea that there is something distinctive about philosophical inquiry vis-à-vis other intellectual pursuits. In a wide-ranging chapter on this topic,Karsten Harries explores how Heidegger’s approach to the transcendentaldraws upon far more than Kant and Husserl. The notion first emerges fromHeidegger’s early theological concern with “eternal truths” and their rela-tion to human beings, a concern evident in Heidegger’s commitment in hisearliest publications to the strong program of transcendental logic. But evenin Being and Time—which, as Lafont argued, submits Kant’s Copernican rev-olution to a “hermeneutic” finitization—he still struggles to preserve some-thing of the a priori. Harries presses the issue: is not thinking always insome sense a transcendence of the finite? In his 1929 Davos dispute withthe neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer,5 Heidegger emphasizes thelimits of transcendental reflection: can it really dictate conditions for all pos-sible experience, or is it not limited to experience as it has actually arisenunder specific historical, and therefore contingent, conditions? Where Cas-sirer reads the self-transcendence of the human being as a “homecoming” (aterm that itself has important connotations in Heidegger’s own thought),Heidegger sees it as a kind of anxiety. Following Nietzsche, Heidegger be-gins to see that a more positive characterization of self-transcendence, andof thinking, is blocked by the scientific pursuit of truth itself, which has noroom for many forms of experience—of the beautiful, for instance, or thegood—that, consequently, seem to disappear from the science-dominatedworld. Heidegger’s late thought, then, can be seen as a continuation of thepursuit of transcendence that attempts to do justice to these excluded expe-riences in an age that puts roadblocks in the way of such reflection.

3.The Role of Subjectivity and the Question of Idealism

Heidegger is rightly understood as an implacable foe of the Cartesian pic-ture of an isolated subject cut off from the world; being-in-the-world isnothing if not a challenge to such a picture. One might expect, then, thatKant’s appeal to the “I think” as the cornerstone of his transcendental phi-losophy would find little resonance in Heidegger’s thought. But this is byno means the case. Instead, Dasein comes to occupy the position of thetranscendental subject, with corresponding fractures introduced into theproject. As we learn in Dermot Moran’s contribution—which traces in de-tail the interconnections between Heidegger’s “question of being” andHusserl’s idea of transcendental phenomenology as “first philosophy”—thefundamental question that troubled Husserl was the “paradox of subjectiv-ity.” For Husserl, the transcendental subject is not, as it was for Kant, a for-


mal principle or logical postulate; it is the concrete locus of the intentional“constitution” of entities in the world. At the same time, as human subjec-tivity it is itself one such entity in the world. Moran shows how Husserl at-tempted to solve this problem by means of the phenomenological reduc-tion, through which a distinction is made between a world-involved “nat-ural attitude” and a world-bracketing “transcendental” attitude. If Heideggerrejects the reduction—and so this sort of solution to the paradox of subjec-tivity—does he not fall back into the problem that one entity, Dasein, isboth “in” the world and also the condition of the world’s very appearing?

However it stands with this ultimate question—and the chapters by Dahl-strom, Malpas, Philipse, Lafont, and Harries, among others, all register itseffects on Heidegger’s thought—Heidegger’s approach can also be seen toilluminate the apparent necessity by which philosophy continually has re-course to some form of subjectivity. Mark Okrent, for instance, shows howHeidegger’s notion of the Worumwillen—the sort of self-understanding thatI have when I am engaged in practical, goal-directed activities—avoids prob-lems that arise when one starts with the Kantian “I think,” that is, with thesubject of cognition or judgment as representation. Such a subject can onlybecome aware of itself by means of a representation, which leads to an infi-nite regress. Heidegger, in contrast, conceives the subject first of all as practi-cal, and in practical activity my self-understanding is a function of the holis-tic and typical structure of such activity: in acting, I act “as” something—gardener, teacher, husband, and so on. Such self-understanding is not asecond-order reflection, but it makes possible the kind of explicit cognizingand representing that finally gets formulated in the practice of judging.

This pragmatic transformation of the transcendental subject has implica-tions for the vexed question of idealism. As Carr’s chapter points out, Kanthimself did not fully break with the Cartesian picture that gives rise tosomething like a “problem of the external world.” His “Refutation of Ideal-ism”—the focal point of many earlier discussions of the nature and scope oftranscendental arguments6—has thus been variously understood. Heideggerclaimed that the problem of the external world was a pseudoproblem, but hisown stance toward the realism/idealism debate, and toward transcendentalidealism in particular, has been widely disputed. In his contribution to thevolume, Herman Philipse compares Heidegger’s strategy of “debunking”skepticism about the external world with similar strategies in Husserl, G. E.Moore, and Rudolf Carnap, and asks whether the resulting concept of“world” can avoid the problem of the Ding an sich. This chapter, which pro-ceeds by unpacking the various possible senses of “idealism” and “realism”in several famous puzzle passages in Being and Time, poses a question similarto the one that occupied Lafont, namely, whether there is, on Heidegger’s view, the possibility of encountering entities outside the global transcendental

Introduction 7

framework,“world.”Where Lafont answers in the negative—thereby attribut-ing to Heidegger a kind of linguistic idealism where meaning determinesreference—Philipse explores the idea that the access to entities in the phe-nomenon of Angst might provide an alternative to such idealism.

Philipse argues that one can accept Heidegger’s “realism” only if onegives up scientific realism—the idea that science is our best access to thingsin the world. What, then, is one to say about scientific practices within theframework of Heidegger’s transcendental philosophy? This is equivalent toasking how it is that Dasein’s understanding supplies the “enabling condi-tions” for the “being of entities.” In place of Kant’s view that such condi-tions “synthesize” the manifold of space and time, Heidegger holds that they“let beings be.” John Haugeland carefully unpacks this central Heideggerianthought, moving from simpler cases—the idea that in order for somethingto be a baseball or a hammer there must be certain social practices and skill-ful abilities (which Heidegger associates with Dasein’s “understanding ofbeing”) that let such things show themselves as such—to the harder case ofhow we are to understand the idea that Dasein’s understanding also letsmere natural entities “be.” Through a series of careful phenomenologicaldistinctions, Haugeland shows how the scientific practices of theory con-struction and experimentation, together with the existential commitmentsthat are bound up with them—provide necessary conditions for bringingnatural things out of their “obscurity.” Because this obscurity is deep, theproject of science is difficult. In Kantian terms, we certainly end up with anempirical realism here. Is this also a scientific realism? Haugeland’s accountof the relation between Newton’s laws and Einstein’s laws emphasizes therole of commitment in scientific practice, and he argues that the urge to saywhich one is “really” true is a holdover of the desire for a God’s-eye viewthat Heidegger’s thought should help us resist.

Of course, the problem of truth—so closely related to questions of tran-scendental idealism and the transcendental subject—has long been a dis-puted topic in the Heidegger literature. Ernst Tugendhat’s argument thatHeidegger’s identification of truth with “disclosedness” abandons the criticalconcept of truth in favor of a concept with no normative force is often seenas having been so persuasive that, on its basis, Heidegger himself came to re-ject the idea that the openness of beings can rightly be called “truth.” DanielO. Dahlstrom revisits this issue, arguing that Heidegger’s earlier notion oftranscendental truth as the condition for the possibility of propositionaltruth did undergo a major transformation. This transformation was not theresult of Tugendhat’s arguments, however, but of Heidegger’s own gradualmove away from posing the question of transcendence in terms of the on-tological difference between being and beings. As Dahlstrom argues on thebasis of passages from Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (From Enown-


ing) (Beiträge zur Philosophie [Vom Ereignis]), to pose the question that waymerely reproduces the problem of treating being in the manner of an“idea.” Heidegger’s later approach to being as the event of the presencing-absencing of beings terms it the “truth that prevails [west ],” and Dahlstromargues that this new approach retains a kind of transcendental structure,since such prevailing, or valence, is the condition of the bivalence on whichTugendhat insisted in any concept of truth. In his final writings Heideggerdoes reject the idea that this prevailing is properly called “truth,” but hecontinues to maintain that such prevailing—including its necessary relationto human beings or “mortals”—makes bivalence possible. Here we recognizethe same move that Crowell’s chapter attributes to the analysis of consciencein Being and Time: Heidegger wants to exhibit the source of our responsive-ness to the normative as such, which provides the ultimate conditions forintentionality, meaning, and ontic truth. In Heidegger’s later thought, as inthe earlier, there thus remains an important relation to the transcendentaltradition.

This collection does not claim to provide a definitive account of the“transcendental Heidegger,” nor does it resolve the question concerningHeidegger’s status as a transcendental thinker or the many issues concerninghis relation to Kant or Husserl. But it does allow the controversies sur-rounding the transcendental in Heidegger’s thought to take center stage,with the hope that the richness of these themes will spur further philosoph-ical investigation.

*Earlier versions of the chapters in this volume were delivered at the conferenceHeidegger and Transcendental Philosophy, held at Rice University, Houston,in April 2003.The editors would like to thank Rice University’s HumanitiesResearch Center for significant financial support of this conference. Furtherfunding, for which we are also grateful, came through the office of the Pres-ident and the office of the Provost of Rice University. Professor WernerKelber, Director of the Humanities Research Center, and Sandra Gilbert,Associate Director, together with graduate students Matthew Burch, IreneMcMullin, and Matthew Schunke made crucial contributions to the orga-nization and facilitation of the conference itself.We are very pleased to havethe chance here to acknowledge these contributions with gratitude. Finally,James Phillips was responsible for preparing the manuscript of this volumefor submission. Special thanks are due him for his careful and timely work.

Introduction 9

in the past, I have argued simultaneously for two theses about MartinHeidegger’s early philosophy that one might well fear are inconsistent withone another.1 I have maintained that Heidegger’s early philosophy embracesa thesis that I call “the primacy of practice,” namely, that the intelligence andintelligibility of human life is explained primarily by practice and that thecontribution made by cognition is derivative. I have also contended, how-ever, that Heidegger’s ontological project, inspired by Kant, constitutes anattempt to acquire a priori knowledge of being. In short, I have been argu-ing that Heidegger is both a transcendentalist and something of a pragma-tist. It is not at all clear that one philosopher can be both.

In this chapter I explore whether the primacy of practice, as I have de-veloped it on Heidegger’s behalf, is in fact inconsistent with his aspirationsto develop a transcendental ontology. To do so, I will draw upon some ofmy readings of Heidegger, to spell out both the primacy of practice and thenature of Heidegger’s vision of an a priori ontology.2 I shall argue that theprimacy of practice and a priori ontology are not directly inconsistent, butonly indirectly inconsistent, if we add a further and rather natural assump-tion into the mix, namely, that the a priori ontology for which we aim ismeant to be, in Heidegger’s words,“theoretic-conceptual” (theoretisch-begrif-flich).3 These three assertions together are inconsistent, and they force Hei-degger into a difficult choice. Finally, I shall show how the argument I de-velop here both supplements and supports the narrative of Heidegger’s early

chapter

Ontology, the A Priori, andthe Primacy of Practice

an aporia in heidegger’s early philosophy

William Blattner

2

methodological agonies, as developed by Theodore Kisiel in his study of thegenesis of Being and Time (Sein und Zeit).4

1.The Primacy of Practice

In section 13 of Being and Time, Heidegger announces that cognition (Er-kenntnis) is a founded mode of being-in-the-world, thus that cognition isderivative of some more basic aspect of human existence.5 He does not de-vote a lot of space in this section to explaining just how he means to arguefor this thesis, but if we put section 13 into the context of Heidegger’s dis-cussion of understanding and interpretation, we can see that Heidegger’sreasoning runs roughly as follows:

1. Cognition is a form of taking-as, that is, all intending is intending-as.

2. The as-structure constitutes interpretation.

3. Interpretation is derivative of understanding.6

4. Therefore, cognition is derivative of understanding.

No single sentence of Being and Time announces (1), but it is hard to knowwhat the argument structure of the crucial paragraph from Being and Time(88–89/61–62) would be, unless Heidegger had (1) in mind. He begins theparagraph by asking what we may learn by examining cognition phenome-nologically, and then narrows his focus down to a relatively “pure” case ofcognition,“observational determination” (betrachtendes Bestimmen). He char-acterizes such observation as “looking at” (Hinsehen) and says that it is aconsummate form of “taking a thing in” (Vernehmen). All taking-in, more-over, is interpretive, in other words, taking-as: “Taking-in [Das Vernehmen]has the same mode of accomplishment as addressing and discussing somethingas something. On the basis of this interpreting in the broadest sense taking-inbecomes determining.”7 This reading of the passage is supported by Heideg-ger’s claim in Being and Time that “all prepredicative, simple seeing of some-thing available is in itself already understanding and interpretive” (189/149).In other words, the argument of the paragraph in question seems to run likethis: not even the best candidate for an interpretation-free form of cogni-tion, not even “rigidly staring” (starres Begaffen) at something, escapes thefunction of interpretation. All cognition, all intending, is a taking-in or tak-ing-as. All cognition is interpretation.

Whereas we have to do a little work to tease (1) out, Heidegger does as-sert (2) directly,8 as we shall explore below. The third point is the burden forsections 31 and 32 of Being and Time. Now, if Heidegger does endorse (1)–(3), then (4) follows.To work out, therefore, Heidegger’s celebrated section 13

Ontology, the A Priori, and the Primacy of Practice 11

claim that cognition is a founded mode of being-in-the-world, we must geta handle on the distinction between understanding and interpretation.

By understanding Heidegger means “neither a sort of cognition, distinguishedin some way from explaining and conceiving, nor even cognition in generalin the sense of thematically grasping [something].”9 What does Heideggerhave in mind with a sort of understanding that is not thematic, not cogni-tive? In ontic (i.e., everyday) discourse we often use the expression to under-stand something to mean “to be able to manage a thing,”“to be equal to it,”“to be capable of something.” In understanding, as an existentiale, “that ofwhich one is capable is not a What, but rather being as existing.”10 Under-standing is, thus, a capacity or ability by means of which I manage or knowhow to do something, but which is not “thematic.” Interpretation, by way ofcontrast, emerges, when we are not equal to a task, when we cannot man-age what we are doing.

Circumspection uncovers, and that means that the world that is already understoodgets interpreted. The available comes explicitly into the sight that understands. Allpreparing, setting aright, repairing, bettering, filling out are accomplished by layingapart [auseinandergelegt] the circumspectively available entity and concerning oneselfwith what has become visible in accordance with this laying-apart. That which hasbeen circumspectively laid apart with respect to its in-order-to, that which has beenexplicitly understood, has the structure of something as something.11

Interpretation emerges when it is necessary to “set things aright,” to “re-pair” them,“better” them,“fill them out,” that is, when felt difficulty arises,or as Heidegger puts it in Basic Problems, when Dasein’s dealings are “dis-turbed.”12 Such interpretation involves both the “explicitness” of its objectand the “as-structure.”

What does Heidegger mean to emphasize, when he contrasts the inex-plicit, nonthematic nature of understanding with the thematic, explicit con-stitution of interpretation? What does he mean by “thematic” and “ex-plicit”? Hubert Dreyfus has offered, in fact, two different ways of under-standing the distinction, neither of which is quite right, however.13 First, wemay note that in understanding, Dasein is “absorbed” (aufgenommen) in itsactivities; the paraphernalia with which Dasein deals, when it genuinely un-derstands it,“withdraws into its availability.”14 This can suggest that by “the-matic” and “explicit” Heidegger means conscious, so that understanding isan un- or preconscious form of dealing with the world, whereas interpreta-tion is a conscious form of doing so. If this is how Heidegger means to dis-tinguish understanding from interpretation, what becomes of the argumentof section 13 of Being and Time? The thesis that cognition is founded in amore basic form of being-in-the-world is then specified into the claim thatconscious experience is founded in un- or preconscious “absorbed coping.”

12 William Blattner

This may well be true—and Dreyfus offers powerful phenomenological ev-idence to this effect—but it cuts philosophical ice only against Descartes orany other philosopher of cognition who regards all cognition as conscious.Clearly, this is far too narrow a construal of Heidegger’s target in section 13.

If the Cartesian notion that all cognition is conscious is not Heidegger’starget in section 13, then what is? A more plausible target is the Kantian-Husserlian conception that cognition is a self-sufficient, subjective activity, onethat can be consummated without the assistance of any noncognitive skills orcapacities. Heidegger suggests this target in section 13, when he writes,

In directing-itself to . . . and grasping Dasein does not somehow first come out ofan inner sphere in which it is primarily enclosed [verkapselt], but rather, in accor-dance with its primary sort of being it is always already “out there” amid the en-countering entities of the world that has in each case already been discovered.WhenDasein visits with [das bestimmende Sichaufhalten bei] the entity to be cognized anddetermines what it is, it does not somehow abandon the inner sphere, but rather, in-sofar it “is out there” amid the object, Dasein is also “inside” in the properly under-stood sense; that is, it itself is as cognizing being-in-the-world. And conversely, tak-ing [Vernehmen] the cognized [object] in is not returning into the “box” of con-sciousness with the booty Dasein has won, in which it has recorded the object, butrather, also in taking, preserving, and retaining the object Dasein remains cognizingDasein as Dasein out there.15

Dreyfus indicates this approach as well, when he describes the target of Hei-degger’s criticism as “a relation between a self-contained subject with mentalcontent (the inner) and an independent object (the outer).”16 What sort ofconception of cognition does such an approach invite or imply? Cognitionwould be self-contained if it were governed by rules. In this case, the mindcould apply its rules to the data of experience and thereby not rely on any-thing beyond its own intelligence in understanding.17 Construing cognitionas rule-governed or algorithmic data processing would then be a second ap-proach we might consider.

There is a certain historical plausibility to this way of looking at things,since Kant and Husserl both understood concepts (or noemata) as rules forexperience. Not only would Kant and Husserl move into Heidegger’s cross-hairs here, but so would the modern “cognitivist” project of artificial intelli-gence on which Dreyfus has focused much of his attention. The drawbackof approaching Heidegger this way is twofold, however. First, there are veryfew references in Being and Time to rules and their limits,18 which makes tex-tually implausible the suggestion that this is the key to reconstructing the dis-tinction between understanding and cognition. Second, if this were the rightway to read Heidegger, it would limit Heidegger’s contemporary applicabil-ity to the field of artificial intelligence. Although this second consideration ishardly decisive, it would certainly be a welcome development if Heidegger’s


analysis of cognition could cast a wider net, including such recent examplesof cognition-centered thinking as John Searle and Donald Davidson.

With this in mind, thirdly and finally, I have suggested that we take thedistinction between understanding and interpretation in Being and Time asfocused on the line between those forms of intelligence that can be cap-tured in propositions and those that cannot. If we approach Heidegger thisway, then his claim is that the most fundamental ways in which we under-stand the world cannot be expressed in propositional content. This putsHeidegger at odds not only with Kant but also with both the “linguisticturn” in Anglo-American philosophy, which has generally been tantamountto a “propositional turn,” as well as the logicist tradition represented by theneo-Kantians and logical empiricists.

Beyond these broad historical advantages, I think we can also connect thisconstrual of the understanding-interpretation distinction with the text. Hei-degger’s official account of interpretation lays emphasis upon two features ofinterpretation: its explicitness and the as-structure. Interpretation is a “develop-ment” (Ausbildung) of understanding, specifically a development in whichunderstanding has become explicit and characterized by the as-structure. In-deed, Heidegger essentially identifies these two features when he writes,“The‘as’ makes up the structure of the explicitness of what is understood; it con-stitutes interpretation.”19 To be explicit, therefore, is to be characterized by an“as.” But what is it to be characterized by an “as”?

There is a fairly clear connection in the text of Being and Time betweenthe as-structure, aspectuality, conceptuality, propositionality, and the fore-structure of interpretation. Let me now summarize these connections. Insection 32 Heidegger spells out the internal “forestructure” (Vorstruktur) ofinterpretation as a trio of phenomena that together constitute interpreta-tion:“forehaving” (Vorhabe),“foresight” (Vorsicht), and “foreconception” (Vor-griff ). Heidegger writes:

An available entity is always already understood in terms of the totality of involve-ments. This totality does not have to be grasped explicitly by a thematic interpreta-tion. Even when it is passed through such an interpretation, it recedes back into theunderstanding that has not been raised up. And precisely in this mode it is an essen-tial foundation of everyday, circumspective interpretation. This interpretation isgrounded in a forehaving. It moves, as an appropriation of understanding, in the un-derstanding being toward such an understood totality of involvements.20

The appropriation of an entity in explicit interpretation rests on the “foun-dation” of our prior understanding of a totality of involvements. Our fore-having, what we have in advance of interpretation, is our understanding, theinexplicit grasp that we have of the entire framework and environment inwhich we are operating.

14 William Blattner

Such understanding bridges to interpretation by way of foresight.

The appropriation of what is understood, but still veiled, carries out its unveiling al-ways under the guidance of an aspect, which fixes that in terms of which the entitythat is understood is supposed to be interpreted. Interpretation is always groundedin a foresight, which “cuts” what has been taken in forehaving “down” to a determi-nate interpretability.21

Interpretation appropriates something “understood, but still veiled.”That isto say, interpretation is directed to something that falls within the ambit ofour understanding but which is opaque, resistant, or problematic in someway. This fits the general contours of the distinction I indicated above: in-terpretation emerges when Dasein’s dealings are disturbed, when Daseinconfronts something it has not mastered already. The foresight focuses theinterpretation upon some specific way in which the entity can be inter-preted, that is, it selects an aspect in terms of which the entity is grasped.Such an aspect in terms of which the entity is grasped is something aswhich we take the object. The as-structure, therefore, emerges with theforesight of interpretation. Foresight in interpretation correlates with the ason the side of the object.

Further, this as-structure requires a certain kind of conceptuality, a fore-or protoconceptuality:

The item understood . . . becomes conceivable through interpretation. Interpreta-tion can create the conceptuality that belongs to the entity to be interpreted interms of this entity itself, or it can force the entity into concepts that it resists in ac-cordance with its sort of being. As always, interpretation has in each case already, ei-ther with finality or with reservations, decided itself in favor of a determinate con-ceptuality; it is grounded in a foreconception.22

To take an entity as something, to grasp it under an aspect, is to subject it to,or let it be seen by way of, a certain conceptuality. Heidegger’s languagehere is a bit ambivalent between conception and conceivability, betweenconceptuality and foreconception or protoconceptuality.Why? In discussingperception, Heidegger comments that perception is an act of interpreta-tion.23 This is to say that all seeing, for Heidegger, is seeing-as. Still, Heideg-ger admonishes us not to infer from the absence of “the explicitness of anassertion” in simple seeing that all interpretation is absent: “All prepredica-tive, simple seeing of something available is in itself already understandingand interpretive [verstehend-auslegend]. . . . That in simple seeing the explic-itness of an assertion can be missing does not justify denying all articulatinginterpretation, and therewith the as-structure, to this simple seeing.”24 Whywould one be inclined to make the mistake Heidegger is concerned toavoid? Noticing that the full determinateness of propositional content on


display in an overt assertion or covert judgment is missing, one might be in-clined to conclude that perception does not have any sort of propositionalcontent. But this would be a mistake. Perception, indeed, interpretation atlarge, does have a sort of propositional content. That content is, however,“modally vague.”

In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant distinguishes between an appearancein general, which is the object of a perception, and the content of a judg-ment, by arguing that an appearance is “indeterminate.”That is, for example,whereas the judgment that my cat is white is definite with respect tomodality (possibility, necessity, actuality), the mere perceptual experience ofmy white cat is not so definite. When a perception is expressed in the formof a judgment, the modal indefiniteness of the perception has to be re-solved. This contrast between indeterminate perception and determinatejudgment, however, does not prevent Kant from concluding that “the samefunction which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment alsogives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition.”25

In essence, a perception has modally or grammatically vague proposi-tional content, whereas a judgment or assertion has modally or grammati-cally definite content. What is the “function of unity” shared by an indeter-minate perception and a determinate judgment or assertion? It is the unityof a concept. In the assertion “my cat is white” and the perception of mywhite cat, the concept cat unifies the content of the experience and judg-ment. This is to say, then, that all perception and judgment, all interpretationin Heidegger’s accounting, is conceptually articulated. And this explainswhy all interpretation is “grounded in a foreconception.”

Understanding, on the other hand, is not grounded in a foreconception,which is to say that it does not have even the determinacy of conceptual ar-ticulation. Understanding is preconceptual, rather than merely preconscious.Not only is it not rule-governed, it is not concept-governed at all. Under-standing lacks the structure of the as.26 Furthermore, this way of readingHeidegger suggests that when he characterizes interpretation as explicit (aus-drücklich), he does not mean conscious, but rather articulate, specifically, concep-tually articulate. Indeed, the German word here, ausdrücklich, is built on theterm Ausdruck, expression, which certainly suggests linguistic expressibility.In short, I am recommending that we read the fault line between under-standing and interpretation as the distinction between those forms of deal-ing with the world that are conceptually articulated and those that are not.If my line of interpretation is correct here, then Heidegger would be com-mitted to the conclusion that interpretation can be captured in proposi-tional form. Indeed, he draws just this inference: “What has been taken-inand determined can be expressed in propositions [Sätze]; it can be retainedand kept as something asserted [als solches Ausgesagtes].”27

16 William Blattner

By implication, what has not been taken-as and determined, that is, un-derstanding, cannot be expressed in propositions, cannot be asserted. Finally,this also makes sense retrospectively of Heidegger’s mysterious commentabout understanding, that “in understanding . . . that of which one is capa-ble is not a What, but rather being as existing.”28 The content of under-standing is not a What, a propositional content; it is, rather, an activity.

So, the primacy of practice, the thesis that the intelligence and intelligi-bility of human life resides primarily in precognitive practice, and that cog-nition is derivative of such practice, takes form in Being and Time by way ofthe distinction between understanding and interpretation. Cognition is tak-ing-as, grasping things under a conceptually articulated aspect, in such a waythat the content of one’s taking-as can be expressed in propositional form,asserted. Understanding is what Dreyfus calls “absorbed coping,” an inex-plicit mastery of one’s world and oneself. Such mastery is inexplicit, how-ever, not in the sense that it is un- or preconscious (though it may wellmostly be), nor in the sense that it is not rule-governed (though it surely isnot), but rather in the sense that it is preconceptual, prepropositional. Pre-cognitive understanding cannot “be expressed in propositions,” it cannot “beretained and kept as something asserted.”This moves Heidegger’s thoughtinto the neighborhood of John Dewey’s pragmatism, even if it does not ex-actly make Heidegger a pragmatist.29

2. Heidegger’s Transcendentalism

Heidegger does not only have deep affinities with the pragmatism of JohnDewey, but also with the transcendentalism of Immanuel Kant. Heideggerappears to want to deploy some form of transcendental method in order toestablish his ontology on an a priori basis. How does he try to do this? InBeing and Time, Heidegger contrasts the status of what he is pleased to callthe “productive logic” that lays the ground for the sciences and the “‘logic’that limps along afterward,” and merely catalogs and organizes the results ofscientific inquiry. Productive logic, Heidegger argues, lays the ground forthe sciences in the specific sense that it generates an “a priori material logic”of the regions of being studied by the sciences:

Such laying the ground for the sciences is fundamentally unlike the “logic” thatlimps along afterward, which investigates the contingent condition of a science withrespect to its “method.” It [namely, Heidegger’s ontological reflection] is productivelogic in the sense that it leaps ahead into a determinate region of being, discloses itfor the first time in its ontological constitution, and makes the structures that aredisclosed in it available to the sciences as transparent directives for inquiry. So, forexample, what is philosophically primary is not a theory of historical concept for-mation, nor a theory of historical knowledge, nor even a theory of history as the


object of the discipline of history, but rather the interpretation of authentically his-torical entities in terms of their historicality. Thus, the positive results of Kant’s Cri-tique of Pure Reason rest upon an approach to working out what belongs to a naturein general, and not upon a “theory” of knowledge. His transcendental logic is an apriori material logic of the region of being of nature.30

For this reason, ontological reflection is immune to refutation by empiricalinquiry. As he puts it in his lectures on Kant’s first Critique:“The basic con-cepts of philology cannot be clarified with the help of philological meth-ods; and the basic concepts of history cannot be determined by researchingthe sources, let alone be grasped by such research. . . . Latent in every sci-ence of a realm of entities there always lies a regional ontology which be-longs to this science, but which can never in principle be developed by thisscience.”31 Thus, ontology is a priori in the specific sense that it does not de-pend upon, and is not open to, refutation and revision by empirical scien-tific inquiry.

In developing an interpretation of this aspect of Heidegger’s thought,32 Ihave contended that Heidegger’s argument for this position in his Kant lec-tures does not warrant the general conclusion he draws. Heidegger does notoffer sufficient justification for the conclusion that the regional ontologiesspecific to individual sciences are a priori disclosable, therefore, properlyphilosophical. Rather, his argument can only reach so far as to conclude thatthe very broad ontologies of the large-scale regions of being analyzed in Be-ing and Time—namely, the occurrent or present-at-hand, the available orready-to-hand, and the existent or human—are a priori, hence philosophical.In order to defend the heart of Heidegger’s apriorism in Being and Time andhis early lectures, we must abandon the most aggressively anti-empirical as-pects of his attitude toward the sciences. To see this, we must understand alittle more about Heidegger’s actual argument in his Kant lectures.

Heidegger argues that any act of conceptual understanding depends onforms of unity that run deeper than any concept.33 In an astonishing act ofexegetical bravura, Heidegger argues that the temporal form of intuition inKant’s Aesthetic is to be identified with the temporal structure of the three-fold synthesis of experience in the A-Deduction, and both of these are inturn to be assimilated to transcendental apperception and the pure produc-tive imagination, the common root of the two stems of cognition, intuition,and understanding.This is all to say that, according to Heidegger, the tempo-ral structure of experience is a fundamental form of unity that lies at thefoundation of all more explicit, conceptually articulated activities. The spe-cific argument in the Kant lectures, as I have reconstructed it,34 runs like this.

The temporal form of intuition is not conceptually articulate, because itis a condition of the possibility of any act of concept formation. Accordingto Heidegger, conceptualization and intuition both require an “antecedent

18 William Blattner

zone,” “a dimension within which I can move while” either intuiting orforming concepts:

This “grasping in one” cannot at all be identical with seeing pregiven representationstogether in terms of the “unity of the concept.” This “grasping in one” is by nomeans the logical act of concept-forming reflection, but rather is the act of the samesynthesis on the basis of which a many is pregiven as a many for a thinking seeing. Isee a pine tree and a willow tree and a lime tree. I do not see them successively bylosing sight of the one seen before. Rather this many must be given to me in one sothat I have a dimension within which I can move while comparing. What encoun-ters [me] must in a certain way belong to me, must lie before me in a surveyable zone[Umkreis]. The unity of this zone, which, so to speak, antecedently holds the mani-fold together in advance, is what is ultimately meant by “grasping in one.”35

Concept formation requires that representations of a sample of objects beable to come before the mind, so that their differences can be excluded inlight of what they have in common. There is much to say about how such aprocess works—and neither Kant nor Heidegger in his Kant lectures saysmuch that is very illuminating about it, since they both rely upon an abstrac-tionist account of concept formation—but this much, at least, Heideggerthinks is presupposed: the representations that are compared and processedmust all, as Heidegger says, belong to me and be available to me.Thus, the “sur-veyable zone” to which Heidegger refers is the zone of my self-consciousness,what Kant calls “transcendental apperception.”

Heidegger argues that this “zone” of availability is the pure form of time.In order to learn to see unity in a sample of experiential data, I must be ableto hold the data together through time.36 This requires the abilities to “ap-prehend” the data in sequence, to “reproduce” or retain the data through theflow of time, and “recognize” or identify their unity. These abilities in turnrequire that the temporal flow of my experience itself possess unity. Unlessthe past remains available to me, not as an explicit object of recollection butas a retained repository of information, I could not “reach back” to the dataonce present to me in order to identify the specific regularity or common-ness I am learning to see.This unitary temporal flow of experience is a nec-essary condition of my capacity to learn concepts. In a nutshell: however it isthat we learn or come to identify conceptual patterns in experience, such identifica-tion presupposes the temporal unity of the flow of experience, what Hei-degger calls “temporality” (die Zeitlichkeit).

The temporal unity of experience, temporality, is not merely necessaryfor concept formation, but Heidegger suggests, sufficient for ontology. Thefundamental unity of the antecedent zone of temporality gives rise to anunderstanding of being. In the peculiar, hybrid language of Heidegger’sKantdeutung, he writes, “But if the synthesis of understanding, as synthesis ofrecognition in the concept, is related to time and if categories emerge from just this


synthesis as activity of understanding, that is, if the three syntheses are interre-lated on the basis of time, then the origin of the categories is time itself.”37

The categories together make up “the concept of the object in general.”Note that the “concept of the object in general” is not a single, simple con-cept. It is, rather, a complex construction assembled from the Kantian cate-gories. Instead of “concept of the object in general,” it is probably clearer tosay “conception of objectivity in general.”This conception of objectivity ingeneral is the correlate in Kant of ontology in Heidegger. Kant’s Analytic ofPrinciples in the Critique of Pure Reason is an analysis of the temporal struc-ture of any object simply insofar as it is an object, just as the promised (butnever completed) third division of Part 1 of Being and Time was intended tobe a temporal analysis of any entity just in so far as it is. So, when Heideg-ger interprets Kant he writes (above) that “the origin of the categories istime itself,” that is, the origin of the conception of objectivity is time itself,Heidegger implies that for him the origin of ontology is time itself. In otherwords, the unity of temporality is rich enough to generate on its own the un-derstanding of being.

To sketch briefly how this would go, consider the following picture.Whatis it to be occurrent (present-at-hand)? In Division One of Being and Time,the concept of the occurrent is focused on independence: to be occurrent isto be independent, both of other objects and of the subject, the understand-ing. The occurrent contrasts, therefore, with the available (ready-to-hand),which is dependent both on other objects (its “co-equipment,” so to speak)and on the human practices in which it is involved. In the final quarter ofBeing and Time, however, Heidegger restates his analysis, and perhaps deepensit, in terms of temporal structure. The occurrent is what shows up in thetemporal structure of “ordinary time,” that is, shows up for Dasein insofar asDasein exhibits the temporality of detached cognition. Occurrent objects,that is, subsist in a temporal form in which the manifold of past-present-fu-ture is a series of contentless and mutually indifferent moments or stretchesof time. Available objects, on the other hand, subsist in a temporal form inwhich the past-present-future is a contentful manifold defined by its relationto the project of use in which the available entity is caught up. Paradigmati-cally, the future that defines equipment is specified by the task or goal thatDasein aims to accomplish insofar as it relates to the equipment. Finally, hu-man beings, Dasein, are defined by a temporal manifold that does not makeup a sequence or series at all, in which the unattainable future that I can-beis not later than the past that I have-already-been.

The details of this comparative analysis of sorts of being are less importantthan the general structure of Heidegger’s ontological project.38 Heidegger at-tempts to extract an ontology of each of the three large-scale regions of be-ing from the temporal structure of the region. And this temporal structure

20 William Blattner

correlates with the temporal structure of Dasein’s mode of relating to the re-gion.The occurrent is disclosed in detached cognition and exhibits the tem-poral structure revealed in such detachment. The available is disclosed inpractical manipulation and use and exhibits the temporal structure of suchuse. And the human is disclosed in self-understanding and exhibits the tem-poral structure of such self-constitution.

Ontology, therefore, is a priori, because it is the expression of the formsof temporality that underlie and make possible all attempts to articulate inconceptual form the nature of the objects we confront. Whatever we mightwant to say about philology’s relationship to language, we can say, if Hei-degger’s argument is sound, that the large-scale ontology contemplated inthe preceding paragraphs is immune to refutation by empirical investiga-tion, since it makes up a condition of the possibility of all empirical conceptformation.

Finally, to draw some of this together and bring it into contact with thetheme of transcendentalism, Heidegger’s ontology is transcendental, in thespecific Kantian sense, in that it is “occupied not so much with objects aswith the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode ofknowledge is to be possible a priori.”39 Heidegger’s ontology presents to uswhat we may know about objects a priori, namely, their temporal structure.

3. Are Heidegger’s Transcendentalism and Pragmatism Inconsistent?

I have thus far maintained in two parallel arguments that Heidegger’s philos-ophy has deep affinities both with Deweyan pragmatism and with Kantiantranscendentalism. Heidegger embraces both the primacy of practice and theapriority of ontology. One is likely to suspect, however, that pragmatism andtranscendentalism, as philosophical attitudes, if not movements, are incom-patible. The transcendental and the a priori are two of the prime targets ofmuch pragmatist anti-epistemology. Despite the confident feeling that prag-matism and transcendentalism are incompatible, the upshot of Heidegger’sKantdeutung appears to be that Kant’s transcendentalism actually presupposesthe primacy of practice. We have seen that for Heidegger, whereas interpre-tation can be captured in propositions and thus brings in the entire appara-tus of aspectuality, conceptuality, and cognition, understanding is precogni-tive, engaged coping. Ontology expresses the a priori form of temporality,the temporal structure of experience more fundamental than any conceptualarticulation of it. Ontology is a priori precisely because it gives expression towhat underlies and makes possible all concept formation. Ontology is im-mune to empirical refutation, because no conceptually articulate, empiricalactivity can violate, and hence call into question, the results of ontological


inquiry. Ontology is a priori, then, because it expresses our preconceptual pre-ontological understanding of being. Put in the exegetical context of Heideg-ger’s Kantdeutung, we may say that Heidegger’s reconstruction of Kant’s firstCritique shows how in order to defend the a priori status of ontology, Kantmust ultimately turn to Heidegger’s antirepresentationalist quasi-pragmatism.

The primacy of practice and transcendental ontology are, therefore, notinconsistent, at least not simply as such. If we take into consideration, how-ever, a further aspect of Heidegger’s conception of philosophical method,we do confront an inconsistency, one that I believe is irresolvable. Accord-ing to the Heidegger of the mid-1920s, ontology must be articulated con-ceptually and expressed propositionally. Ontology is, after all, a science. It istheoretical in nature. It is expressed in Being and Time in a web of proposi-tions. Heidegger could not put it more clearly than he does in Basic Prob-lems, when he writes,“Philosophy is the theoretic-conceptual interpretationof being, its structure, and its possibilities.”40 It is for this reason, if no other,that Heidegger is not by his own lights an existentialist, that he is no Kierke-gaard or Jaspers. In the hands of Kierkegaard and Jaspers philosophy is merelyedifying; in Heidegger’s hands it is scientific.

Heidegger’s writings from the mid- to late 1920s are filled with thisrhetoric of scientificity: the opening sections of Basic Problems lay great stresson the scientificity of philosophy, which is to say ontology, and contrast sci-entific ontology with mere “worldview philosophy.” In the process of devel-oping this theme of scientificity, moreover, Heidegger emphasizes the mere“positivity” of worldview philosophy.

Every world- and life-view is positing [setzend], that is, is related existingly [seiend]to entities. It posits entities, it is positive. . . . To worldview belongs this multifac-eted positivity, such that it is in each case rooted in a thus and so existing Dasein, isrelated to the existing world, and interprets the factically existing Dasein. Becausethis positivity, that is, the relatedness to entities, the existing world, and existing Da-sein, belongs to the essence of worldview and thereby to the construction of world-views in general, the construction of worldviews precisely cannot be the task ofphilosophy.41

Philosophy does not concern itself with the positive, with what is merelygiven, the way human life happens to be constituted here and now. Philoso-phy focuses, instead, on what is necessary, what underlies all positivity. AsKant argued in the first Critique, necessity is the hallmark of the a priori.What is necessary must be known a priori. Scientific philosophy, in contrastwith pseudo-philosophical worldview thinking, must be an a priori science.

Heidegger’s point here, moreover, is not just a negative rhetorical jab atworldview philosophy. It informs his detailed conception of phenomeno-logical method.

22 William Blattner

Being should be apprehended and made into a theme. Being is in every case the be-ing of an entity, and for this reason it is accessible primarily only in reference to anentity [im Ausgang von einem Seienden].Therefore, phenomenology’s apprehending vi-sion must be directed to an entity, but in such a way that the being of the entitythereby becomes salient and available for thematizing [zur Abhebung und zur möglichenThematasierung kommt].42

Phenomenology thematizes being. According to Being and Time,“thematizingobjectifies.”43 From Kant forward there is an intimate connection between ob-jectivity and conceptuality. In section 19 of the B-Deduction, Kant linksobjective validity with judgment, which is propositional or conceptual. Forthis reason, according Kant, the understanding—Kant’s understanding, notHeidegger’s—is the faculty of both concepts and objects. There can be noobjectivity without conceptuality.Thematizing in Being and Time is thereforea matter of interpretation, putting understanding into conceptual form. Thisexplains why interpretation, but not understanding, is thematic.

If phenomenological ontology is conceptually articulated and proposi-tionally expressed, what does this tell us about the understanding of beingto which it gives voice? It entails that the understanding of being can becaptured in propositions. (At least, unless ontology is a hopeless distortion ofthe understanding of being.) However, if the understanding of being can becaptured in propositions, then it is, by the analysis above, not understandingat all, but rather interpretation. Put the other way around, whatever it is thatontology puts into words, it cannot be an understanding of anything, includ-ing being. And if it is not an understanding of being, that is, does not lineup with the pure productive imagination of Heidegger’s Kant, then it can-not enjoy a priori status. It does not capture something more fundamentalthan the conceptual, something that would thereby prove to be immune toempirical refutation.

Therefore, there is nothing inconsistent in Heidegger’s transcendentalistquasi-pragmatism until we add into the brew the notion that ontology is“theoretic-conceptual.” Heidegger does face an aporia in his early concep-tion of philosophy, but it is not a simple inconsistency between transcen-dentalism and the primacy of practice. The aporia is a triadic inconsistencybetween the primacy of practice, the transcendental conception of ontologyas a priori, and the further expectation that ontology is scientific, that is,theoretic-conceptual.

One might object: “But surely Heidegger saw these difficulties and of-fered a method for overcoming them, namely, hermeneutics!” In the wordsof Being and Time,

From the investigation itself it will emerge that the methodological sense of phenom-enological description is interpretation. The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein has


the character of hermeneuein, through which the authentic sense of being and the basicstructures of its own being are made known to the ontological understanding that be-longs to Dasein itself. The phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics in the originalmeaning of the word, according to which it designates the business of interpretation.44

Hermeneutics is the practice of putting understanding into words, of givingvoice to what lies below the level of articulate expression. Putting the under-standing of being into words, then, is a hermeneutic act. Scientific ontology,if it is to be possible at all, must be hermeneutic. This argument, unfortu-nately, does not so much resolve our worries as give them a name. Certainly,if the understanding of being could be expressed in propositional form, thenthe business of doing so would deserve the name of hermeneutics. Giving themethod of ontology a name does not clarify its inner possibility, and it isprecisely this possibility that we have called into question. It is noteworthy,then, that Being and Time does so little to clarify the nature of hermeneutics,so little to explain to the puzzled reader how ontology could be a matter ofhermeneutic interpretation.45

If hermeneutics is not the answer to our worries,46 then we will have toabandon one of the three jointly inconsistent elements of Heidegger’smethod. Which should it be? To those who are attracted to the transcen-dental-phenomenological Heidegger, the answer is obvious: we shouldabandon the primacy of practice. We saw above, however, that Heidegger’sjustification of the transcendental status of ontology relies upon the primacyof practice. Thus, we cannot resolve the aporia by abandoning the primacyof practice. We are forced to choose between transcendentalism and scien-tific ontology. This is to say, Heidegger cannot have it both ways, he cannotsimultaneously insist that ontology is immune to empirical refutation andthat it is a scientific theoretic-conceptual enterprise.

We find historical confirmation of the stubbornness of this aporia in thevicissitudes of Heidegger’s methodological reflections prior to Being andTime. Theodore Kisiel has described in great detail Heidegger’s inconsistentattitude toward the theoretic-conceptual nature of philosophy.47 In his earlyFreiburg lecture course The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of World-Views(Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem),48 Heidegger toyswith the idea of abandoning the theoretic-conceptual nature of philosophy.He suggests that Husserl’s “principle of principles”“does not have a theo-retical character.”49 Phenomenology is meant to be “the primordial bearingof life-experience and life as such,” and this bearing “becomes absolutewhen we live in it—and that is not achieved by any constructed system ofconcepts, regardless of how extensive it may be, but only through phenom-enological life in its ever-growing self-intensification.”50 He follows theseremarks up in the next subsection of the lecture (section 20a) with the sug-

24 William Blattner

gestion—and this is all it is here—that phenomenological language mightnot be theoretical, conceptual, and generalizing.

The problem of method presented itself in the form of the question ofthe possible description of experiences. The crudest but already sufficientlythreatening objection pertained to language. All description is a “grasping-in-words”—“verbal expression” is generalizing. This objection rests on theopinion that all language is itself already objectifying, that is, that living inmeaning implies a theoretical grasping of what is meant, that the fulfillmentof meaning is only object-giving.51

In the next paragraph he labels the assumption that “grasping-in-words”is always theoretical an “undemonstrated prejudice.” If this were so, he con-cludes, then it would be false that “all verbal meaning consists in nothingbut” theoretical universality.52 So, in these passages Heidegger aims to under-cut the assumption that all hermeneutic expression is theoretic-conceptual. Indefending hermeneutic interpretation as the method of phenomenology, Hei-degger does not try to explain how the precognitive understanding of beingcan be put into “theoretic-conceptual” propositional form. Rather, he suggeststhat the verbal expression of phenomenology is nonconceptual: nontheoreti-cal, nonpropositional, nonscientific. Ontology is not scientific, but rather aimsfor “self-intensification.”53 In another of his early Freiburg lecture courses,published as Ontology:The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Ontologie: Hermeneutik derFaktizität), he describes the aim of philosophy to be “wakefulness.”

Steven Crowell has (in a gentle and friendly fashion) criticized Kisiel’snarrative of the genesis of Being and Time by arguing that Kisiel arbitrarilydeemphasizes Heidegger’s affinity with Husserl’s phenomenology.54 Husserl’sphenomenology provides Heidegger with a model of a formal science ofbeing. Phenomenology gives us access to the formal structure of objectiv-ity, rather than merely to the general content of objects. Phenomenologythus allows philosophy to escape from the prospect of merely integratingthe results of empirical research, the prospect of remaining a logic thatmerely “limps along afterward.” Phenomenology delineates the special topicof philosophy, namely, being, the formal structure of what is, and gives usnonempirical access to it, that is, access independent of empirical science, sothat philosophy can become a “productive logic” of being. Crowell makes aconvincing case that this model of phenomenological science had a grip onHeidegger. That the aspiration to an a priori formal ontology plays a signifi-cant role in Heidegger’s development does not show us, however, how thataspiration can be realized. When Heidegger does actually turn to the foun-dations of a priori ontology in his Kant lectures, we see that the way inwhich he defends the apriority of ontology is incompatible with its scien-tificity. Because the Kant lectures postdate Being and Time, Kisiel does not


explore them and the light they shed on Heidegger’s proposed methodol-ogy. Had he done so, he could have supplemented the narrative of Heideg-ger’s early Freiburg years with an argument drawn from the Marburg years,an argument that shows how Heidegger is forced to choose between apri-ority and scientificity.

Not long after Being and Time and the Kant lectures Heidegger seemsonce again to give up on scientific ontology.55 After returning to Freiburg,Heidegger begins to move back toward a nonscientific conception of phi-losophy. Indeed, Heidegger seems to be struggling to define how we cantalk about being nonscientifically. In his 1929 inaugural lecture at Freiburg,“What Is Metaphysics?” he is driven to the conclusion that ontology isabout the Nothing.56 It may well be that metaphysics is about nothing, notonly because we are invited into it by anxiety, but also because we cannotsay anything disciplined, wissenschaftlich, theoretic-conceptual about beingfrom within anxiety. Looked at in this way, the position of “What Is Meta-physics?” is a desperate halfway house between the scientific ontology ofBeing and Time and the later, poetic vision of the discourse of being thatemerges in the 1930s. “What Is Metaphysics?” may then represent an all-or-nothing response to the collapse of transcendental phenomenology: scienceor nothing, the Nothing.

In the 1930s Heidegger turns away from the failed models of philosophyof the 1920s and gropes around for something new. Through all the detailsof Heidegger’s path from Being and Time to “Time and Being,” the one con-stant remains that Heidegger seeks to develop and perhaps stabilize a dis-course of being. He holds on to the idea that this discourse of being is morefundamental than empirical scientific research and immune to revision bythe impress of such research. His name for the discourse of being changesthrough the years: phenomenological ontology, metaphysics, thinking.What-ever it is called, it maintains its apriority, its priority to empirical science.Thatthe discourse of being retains its apriority, even when it escapes scientificity, isan indirect confirmation of my account above: the apriority of the discourseof being is not a consequence of its scientificity, but rather of the primacy ofpractice.The attempt to put this discourse into theoretic-conceptual form as ascience of being fails, and when it does, Heidegger gives up on the science, noton being.

In an especially clear statement of this in “Time and Being,” Heideggerstates that even trying to relate thinking in the form of a lecture is dubious,because lectures speak “merely in propositional statements.”57 Propositional-ity—that is, conceptuality, interpretation, cognition—is an obstacle to ouraccess to being. This explains Heidegger’s attraction to poetry as a form ofthinking, for poetry eschews propositional-conceptual representation in favor

26 William Blattner

of a more direct and evocative encounter with being. Heidegger’s turn awayfrom philosophical science is, therefore, not merely a spasmodic display ofsome crypto-religious mysticism of the sort identified by Herman Philipsein his book on Heidegger’s philosophy of being.58 It is, quite surprisingly, adisciplined response to a philosophical aporia that besets his early conceptionof ontology.59


the centerpiece of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is called the “transcen-dental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding.” Kant explainsthat he has chosen the term deduction by analogy to juridical procedure. Ju-rists distinguish between questions of fact (quid facti) and questions of law orright (quid juris), he says,1 and the answer to the latter sort of question iscalled a deduction. Kant has drawn up a list or table of the pure concepts ofthe understanding, or categories, and the “deduction” is meant to answerthe question: by what right are these categories applied a priori to objects? Itis a question, he says, of “how subjective conditions of thought can have objectivevalidity.”2

In his reading of this part of Kant’s Critique, Heidegger takes Kant to taskfor his choice and explanation of the term deduction. “The transcendentaldeduction, conceived as quaestio iuris, is the most fatal part of Kant’s philoso-phy to which one can appeal. The transcendental deduction is untenable al-most throughout [fast durchgängig unhaltbar].”3 “The questio juris should notbe taken as the guiding thread for the interpretation of this central chapterof Kant’s.”4 The problem of the section called “transcendental deduction,”he says, is “ganz und gar keine juristische Geltungsfrage”—not at all a juridicalquestion of validity.5 In fact,“eine juristische Fragestellung [hat] keinen Sinn,” ajuridical inquiry makes no sense here,6 and by introducing the quid jurisKant is guilty of nothing less than a “misunderstanding of the problem oftranscendence [Verkennung des Transzendenzproblems].”7 Heidegger is criticalof Kant on many points in his interpretation of the Critique, but these arecertainly the harshest and most emphatic expressions he uses; Heideggerseems irritated, if not angry, an indication that something important is atstake. This is remarkable, since on the whole, of course, Heidegger views

chapter

Heidegger on Kant on Transcendence

David Carr

3

Kant very positively and wants to enlist him as a forerunner of his ownproject. How can we reconcile this with Heidegger’s view that Kant hasgone wrong at the very heart of his major work? This is the question I wantto explore in the following pages.

A few words on the background and context of the passages I justquoted. The years before and immediately after the publication of Being andTime (Sein und Zeit; 1927) were the years of Heidegger’s most intense pre-occupation with Kant. That work itself contains many discussions of Kant.The same is true of the lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology(Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie; 1927), which was followed in the wintersemester of 1927–28 by the course Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s“Critique of Pure Reason” (Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants “Kritikder reinen Vernunft”), from which the above passages were taken. Heidegger’scelebrated debate with Cassirer at Davos, primarily on Kant, took place inearly 1929, and it was followed in the same year by the publication of Kantand the Problem of Metaphysics (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik). Onething that strikes readers of Heidegger on Kant in these writings is that hisanalysis is very detailed and close to the text, but it is focused entirely on thefirst Critique, and indeed goes no farther than the first third of that work.He has almost nothing to say about the “transcendental dialectic” and itscritique of traditional metaphysics, in which the first Critique culminates,much less about Kant’s moral philosophy, for which the first Critique is pre-paring the way. Heidegger returns to Kant in texts of the 1940s, 1950s, and1960s, notably in the Nietzsche lectures, in “Kants These über das Sein”(“Kant’s Thesis About Being”) and in Die Frage nach dem Ding? (What Is aThing?). But these later reflections derive, I believe, from a very different per-spective not only on Kant but on the history of modern philosophy gener-ally. I will not be concerned with them here.

Heidegger is admirably open about what he admits is the “violence” of hisinterpretation of Kant. In his 1950 foreword to the second edition of Kantand the Problem, he is sympathetic to the misgivings of historians of philoso-phy whose methods are those of “philosophical philology,” and admits that heis operating according to different rules. He even admits, in retrospect, that hisprocedure has led to “omissions and shortcomings” in his book, though hedoes not say what they are.8 In the preface to the Phenomenological Interpreta-tion, Heidegger predictably cites Kant’s well-known comment, with referenceto Plato, that it is not unusual that we can understand an author better thanhe understood himself, and a lesser-known complaint Kant makes against his-torians of philosophy, who in their concern with what philosophers said,overlook what they wanted to say—comments Kant probably wishes posthu-mously he had never made, since they are so easily turned against him.9 Thedeclared focus of Heidegger’s interpretation is “das, was Kant hat sagen wollen

Heidegger on Kant on Transcendence 29

[what Kant wanted to say],” or, “die Fundamente dessen, was er meint [thebasis of that which he intended].”10

In the 1950 foreword mentioned above, Heidegger says, as the translatorputs it, that “readers have taken constant offense at the violence of my inter-pretation.” I have to confess that, more often than not, I have been amongthose readers. To be sure, when one reads Heidegger on Kant, or Heideggeron any other philosopher for that matter, one expects to learn more aboutHeidegger than about the philosopher in question. But surely there are lim-its to this principle of charity. Heidegger goes too far, it has always seemedto me, when he says that Kant is engaged in a “Grundlegung der Metaphysik[laying the ground for metaphysics]” rather than a critique of metaphysics, andthat his project has “nothing to do” (nichts zu schaffen) with epistemology orphilosophy of science.11 And when he says of Kant that “the I, the ego, is forhim as for Descartes the res cogitans, res, something [etwas] that thinks,”12 andthat it occupies the role of the hypokeimenon in traditional metaphysics,13 Ihave to wonder, in all seriousness, if Heidegger ever got as far as the Paralo-gisms in his reading of the Critique.

When I first came across Heidegger’s assertion that the transcendental de-duction is not a deduction, then, my reaction was similar. Granted, there islittle agreement on how to interpret it. But to say that it is not a deduction,as Kant himself defines that term? That seemed to me to go too far. Somereflection has convinced me, however, that in this case Heidegger has got itexactly right. Whether or not he has discovered what Kant wanted to say, hehas at least correctly articulated what Kant should, and perhaps should not,have said in this context, and I want to explain why I think this is so.

1.The Problem of Transcendence

Let’s explore first what Heidegger means by his criticisms of Kant’s idea of“deduction.” In saying that Kant misunderstands “the problem of transcen-dence” Heidegger is suggesting that the problem of transcendence is whatKant should be understanding, and indeed his whole reading of Kant is cen-tered around the notion of transcendence as the central problem for Kant.Indeed, it is from this problem that, according to Heidegger,“transcendentalphilosophy” gets its name.14 Since this is certainly not Kant’s way of charac-terizing his central preoccupation, or of explaining what transcendental phi-losophy is, we must ask what Heidegger means when he imputes this prob-lem to Kant.

In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger defines “Transzendenz”as “das Überschreiten der reinen Vernunft zum Seienden, so dass sich diesemallererst als möglichem Gegenstand Erfahrung anmessen kann.”15 Roughly:pure reason steps beyond itself to what is, so that the latter can function as

30 David Carr

an object for experience. In Phenomenological Interpretation he speaks of thephenomenon of transcendence as “das Gegenstehen des anschaulich Begeg-nenden [the standing over against of what is intuitively encountered],”16 “dasGegenstehen von etwas als Gegen-stand [the standing over against of some-thing as ob-ject].”17 Objects can be known empirically only if they are al-ready objects, not just intuitions. The Copernican turn is rephrased:“Onlywhen objects qua objects conform to objectivity can empirical knowledgeconform to objects.” In Heidegger’s language this means:“Ontic truth pre-supposes ontological truth.”18 Transcendence can be named, in much moreKantian language,“die apriorische Konstituierung der Gegenständlichkeit.”19

Thus the problem of transcendence is to show how “Gegenstandsbeziehung[the a priori constitution of objectivity]” is possible a priori, that is, how it ispossible that what is encountered in intuition stands over against us as an ob-ject before, or so that, it can be known empirically.20

Everything Kant says in the transcendental deduction, according to Hei-degger, circles as it were around the phenomenon of transcendence, comingat it from different sides, and “at times it looks as if Kant in fact had a realgrasp of the phenomenon.”21 But then he misunderstands it in the way hesets up the problem. Heidegger’s objection to the quid juris conception ofthe deduction lies in his view of how Kant thinks of transcendence as aproblem and how he envisions the solution to this problem. The key to theproblem lies in turn in how Kant thinks of the a priori. “A priori is whatbelongs to the subject, what is in the mind [Gemüt].”22 The categories arethen conceived of as a priori in this sense. But how can something in themind have validity for what is outside the mind? “By what right can thesubjective be taken for something objective as well, which essentially it isnot?”23 In short, transcendence can be a problem, in the way Kant envisagesit, only on the basis of a “transcendence-free conception of the a priori”and a conception of the mind as “isolated subject.”24 Thus subject and ob-ject are conceived, in Heidegger’s language, as “zwei vorhandene Seiende[two occurrent entities]” and the problem is that of how representations inthe subject can meet up—“zusammentreffen”—with their objects outside.25

What has happened here, according to Heidegger, is that Kant’s approachto this problem, indicated by his choice of the word deduction, is “polemi-cal,” that is, it has been dictated by the way his opponents posed the ques-tions. But this means that “Kant is seeking the solution of the problemwhile being guided by a kind of question which is already in itself finallyimpossible.”26 I take this to mean that in using this terminology, Kant has,according to Heidegger, reverted to the framework that set the terms of thedebate about knowledge carried out by Kant’s predecessors, beginning withDescartes. If we begin with the Cartesian isolated subject, and conceive ofthe world to be known as a transcendent realm of objects, then any claim


that the subject’s representations correspond to this outside world must beproved or justified. We would then be in the business of comparing ourrepresentations with their objects, a task that is futile, as Hume saw. SinceHume still accepts the traditional terms of the debate, the only outcome forhim can be skepticism. And if Kant also accepts these terms and sees theproblem in the same way, Heidegger seems to be saying, then Kant is nobetter off.

The point Heidegger is making is that if Kant’s contribution is to haveany value, then it cannot consist in just another attempt to solve the oldproblem of skepticism; it must be seen as overthrowing the old problem andraising a new question. This actually happens in the section called “The De-duction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding,” as we can understand ifwe are able to see beyond the polemical framework suggested by its title andKant’s explanation of it. When Kant describes the transcendental deduction,in a formulation Heidegger seems to prefer, as “the explanation of the man-ner [Art] in which concepts relate themselves a priori to objects,”27 then wemust read the word “explanation” (Erklärung) to mean not justification orproof that they do so relate themselves, but as answering the question:“whatis the nature [Art] of these concepts . . . that they have objective reality a pri-ori?”28 In other words, it is a question of the essential nature of these con-cepts. It is senseless to first list the categories and then ask after their possibleapplication to objects, for “this application ‘to objects,’ this object-relation[Gegenstandsbeziehung] as such, is constituted precisely by them.”29 As Kantsays in a passage Heidegger is fond of quoting,“the a priori conditions of apossible experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possi-bility of objects of experience.”30

But this search for conditions leads to the even more fundamental ques-tion of the essential nature of the subject to whom these concepts belong.The question of the possibility of experience is the question of the “tran-scendental character [transzendentale Beschaffenheit] of the subject.”31 Translat-ing this unabashedly into his own terminology, Heidegger says it is a ques-tion of the “Seinsverfassung des Daseins [the ontological constitution ofDasein]”32 The latter is not an isolated subject; it is “ein Seiendes, das wesen-haft außer sich ist [a being which is fundamentally outside itself]”33 And be-cause it is essentially outside itself, it can also come back to itself and remainwith and in itself. Thus, “Die Transzendenz ist die Voraussetzung fur dieMöglichkeit des Selbstseins [Transcendence is the presupposition for the pos-sibility of being a self ].”34 The “explanation” of “Gegenstandsbeziehung,”then, lies in the “Transzendenz-Struktur des Daseins.”

This structure is revealed, Heidegger thinks, in the theory of the three-fold synthesis and the concept of transcendental apperception which are ex-posed in the first part of the A-Deduction. He quotes Kant’s distinction, at

32 David Carr

Axvif, between the subjective and the objective “sides” of the transcendentaldeduction, in which Kant declares the former “not essential” to his mainpurpose, which lies in the objective side. But Heidegger thinks he has got itprecisely backward. It is the objective deduction that Kant casts as a juridicalprocedure, and in so doing he misunderstands the internal connection be-tween the two sides. “More than that: he fails to see that precisely the radicalexecution [radikale Durchführung] of the subjective side of the task of the deductionalso accomplishes [mit erledigt] the objective task.”35

In the second-edition version of the transcendental deduction Kantlargely suppresses the subjective side of the deduction, and this is why Hei-degger takes the first edition as his focus. Kant thus departed from his orig-inal insight, limited as he was by what he saw as the options open to him.Having introduced the distinction between the “faculties” of sensibility andunderstanding, Kant knew that his investigations of them could not be em-pirical or psychological in the manner of the empiricists (he mentionsLocke). But the only alternative he knew was the rational or logical. So hewavers [schwankt] between psychology and logic, and his uncertainty at thelevel of content is the result of his uncertainty of method. “In place of anunclear mixture of psychology and logic, what was needed was the clear in-sight that it was a matter of a purely phenomenological interpretation ofhuman existence [Dasein] as knowing—a phenomenology that supports[trägt] [both] psychology and logic.”36

The essential task of the transcendental deduction is this: before Kant canreveal the categories in particular in their relation to objects, he must showhow “überhaupt” anything like a relation to an object,“oder das Gegenste-hen eines Gegenstandes,” is constituted.37 This is accomplished in the de-scription of the threefold synthesis—or would be, if Kant had correctly un-derstood its implications. For Heidegger it reveals the role of the imagina-tion as productive and transcendental, and is ultimately grounded intemporality. For Kant this analysis culminates in the idea of transcendentalapperception, which functions as a sort of “Urkategorie” (primordial cate-gory) or “vehicle” for all categories and all concepts.38 But Heidegger seesthis section as deeply ambiguous. He thinks that Kant has produced twoconflicting maps of the mind. In one, which emerges as his official doctrine,he divides the mind into two “Grundquellen” (basic sources) or “Stämme”(roots) of knowledge, sensibility and understanding, and then gives the “Ithink,” as the principle of the understanding, the role of unifying the two.In the other, he lists three “Erkenntnisquellen” (sources of cognition), namelysense, imagination, and apperception,39 and even suggests in one passage thatsynthetic unity of apperception presupposes a pure synthesis of imagina-tion.40 Kant’s twofold division wins out in the end, because Kant is toomuch of a rationalist to give such a central role to imagination. But Kant is


not entirely happy with this version either, according to Heidegger, becausein the introduction, where he first introduces the twofold division, he sug-gests darkly that the two faculties “perhaps spring from a common, but to usunknown root.”41 Heidegger believes that Kant actually discovered that rootin the transcendental imagination but “shrank back” from what he hadseen.42 In the end, for Heidegger, the imagination is not merely on an equalfooting with sense and understanding, but is prior to both.

For Heidegger apperception, as the unifying principle of the understand-ing, must be reinterpreted in light of its relation to the threefold synthesisand the unifying role of the imagination. Rather than standing outside ofand opposed to time, as Kant seems to suggest, the “I think” must be con-ceived as temporal synthesis. Only when it is understood in this way can itbe “that which at the deepest level makes the relation to an object possible[das, was im innersten Grunde die Gegenstandsbeziehung möglich macht].”43 This isthe very subjectivity of the subject, its character of being essentially outsideitself. For Heidegger, Kant’s thesis is that “the representing of something—orthe representedness of something—is not possible unless the representer, thesubject, is in itself transcendent, unless Sich-verhalten-zu [comportment toward],Offenheit-für [openness for], Hinausstand [standing out], Exstasis, belong to itsExistenz.”44 This is what Heidegger calls the “ekstatische Grundverfassungdes Subjekts.”45

2. Kant and Intentionality

It is Heidegger’s interpretation of the threefold synthesis and his treatmentof the productive or transcendental imagination as the “unknown root” ofsense and understanding that is rightly regarded as the centerpiece of hisreading of Kant. It is also that part of his analysis that tells us more aboutHeidegger, I think, than it does about Kant. For this reason I will not gointo it further here. In the foregoing I put the emphasis on Heidegger’s de-nunciation of the quid juris derivation of the term deduction because, as Isaid, I think this part of Heidegger’s reading can really tell us somethingabout Kant, especially about his place in the historical context and his rela-tion to his predecessors. In other words, it actually helps us understand Kantand his role and place in modern philosophy. In this section I will try toshow how this is so.

Heidegger’s attack on the quid juris question is much more prominent inthe Phenomenological Interpretation than it is in the Kant book, though it isthere as well.There is no doubt that it plays an important part in Heidegger’sAuseinandersetzung with the neo-Kantians, especially those of the Southwestschool, who place the notion of the Geltung (holding) or Gültigkeit (validity)of judgments at the heart of their own interpretation. This is also an aspect

34 David Carr

of Heidegger’s interpretation that I choose not to explore, interesting as itis, since again this is more about Heidegger and his contemporaries thanabout Kant.With reference to Heidegger’s own situation, however, I will saythat I think the Kant interpretation reveals the deep and pervasive, thoughhere unacknowledged, influence of Husserl on Heidegger, at a time whenhe is trying to divest himself of that influence. We should note the centralrole of the concept of Gegenstandsbeziehung in his treatment of transcen-dence as Kant’s central concern in the Critique. Heidegger is, after all, talk-ing about intentionality, though he steadfastly refuses to pronounce theword. It might be suggested that he avoids the word because it is anachro-nistic and does not belong to Kant’s vocabulary. But that is also true ofGegenstandsbeziehung, and for that matter, Transzendenz. In any case, the in-fluence of Husserl on Heidegger’s treatment lies not in his choice of thistheme, or even in his preference for the A-Deduction, which he also shareswith Husserl. It lies much deeper, as we shall see later.

Whatever name we choose, it is obvious that intentionality or Gegen-standsbeziehung is the heart of Kant’s concern. But that should not be sur-prising, since in a way it has been the major concern of all modern philoso-phers since Descartes. Husserl preferred the term intentionality, but he didnot invent the thing to which it refers. Everyone had always recognized thatthe whole point, we might say, of consciousness or mind is that it suppos-edly reaches out beyond itself and puts us in contact with a world of inde-pendent reality. The question for Kant’s predecessors was how or indeedwhether it actually does what it purports to do.

What I want to argue is that Kant’s originality lies in seeing beyond thisquestion and then transforming the traditional approach to it, something hedoes with some hesitation, confusion, and backsliding. This, I think, is whatHeidegger has correctly seen and to some extent shown in his analysis.

In the transcendental deduction, when Kant introduces the transcenden-tal unity of apperception or self-consciousness, and distinguishes it fromempirical self-consciousness, he is already introducing intentionality into hisanalysis, if only grammatically, just as Descartes had done with the cogito:the cogito requires its cogitatum; thinking is thinking of or about some-thing or that something is the case. Here, of course, Kant is interested in aparticular kind of thinking, namely that which is involved in our knowledgeof the sensible world. The question here is: how is experience, that is, em-pirical knowledge, possible? Such knowledge requires that our thinking belinked with intuitions as sense-representations. But what is the nature ofthat link? One might expect that, since thought requires an object, it is thesesense-representations that serve as its objects.

Kant’s rejection of this idea is the very heart of his approach to the prob-lem of knowledge. It might be said that Kant here rejects the so-called way


of ideas which had dominated the treatment of knowledge since Descartes,and which was notoriously explained by Locke when he wrote that theterm idea “serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understand-ing when a man thinks.”46 Kant indeed sometimes uses the term Vorstellungin a way that corresponds roughly to the term idea and its cognates in otherlanguages, as used by Locke and other modern philosophers. And he talksabout sense-representations, even giving them at one point the Humeandesignation impressions [Eindrücke],47 and asserts that they are necessarily in-volved in our knowledge of the sensible world. But these representationsare “a mere determination of the mind [Bestimmung des Gemüts].”48 Knowl-edge of the sensible world is not about our mind or its contents, but pre-cisely about the sensible world, or rather about objects in the sensible world.This knowledge requires that we have sense-representations, but it also re-quires that, by their means, objects be thought. Sense-representations must beunited not in the subject that has them, but in an object. Another way ofputting this is to say that, in order to have knowledge of the sensible world,it is not enough that we have sense-representations; we must also take themto be representations, that is, to present or stand for something beyondthemselves. This act of taking them to be so, is just what is expressed in theapperceptive “I think,” which must mean in this context:“I am representingan object.”

This is clearly expressed in the doctrine of the transcendental object, the“etwas überhaupt = x,” as the object that corresponds to but stands overagainst (gegenübersteht) the knowledge we have of it.49 The condition for thisis a transcendental, not merely empirical, apperception. In the B-Deductionhe speaks of the objective unity of apperception.This apperception representsthe “I” not merely as unity of its own representations, but as an ability tothink objects through those representations.

Having articulated the object-relation in this way, it seems clear that Kantis not asking whether the mind is so related, but how.To ask whether would beto attempt to refute skepticism regarding our knowledge of nature. To besure, a long tradition of commentators has taken Kant to be doing just that.But it is hard to square this view of Kant’s project with the fact that he un-equivocally affirms, at the starting point of his inquiry, and so as one of itsassumptions, that “we are in possession” of a priori knowledge of nature,that “even common sense is never without it.”50 He also affirms emphati-cally that, with regard to mathematics and natural science, it is not a ques-tion of asking whether such knowledge is possible, since it so clearly is ac-tual. The question for Kant is how such knowledge is possible. Thus Kanthere seems to depart completely from the concerns of his predecessors,from Descartes on, who thought that science must look to philosophy for a

36 David Carr

warrant it is incapable of providing for itself. Indeed, he notes that in hisown day,“the study of nature has entered on the secure path of a science,”51

presumably without the help of philosophers, since he takes a dim view ofwhat his predecessors had accomplished.

But if Kant is not out to defeat skepticism, what then is he doing? Skep-ticism arose out of the traditional conception of what it means to haveknowledge. According to this conception, knowledge of the real worldmeant knowledge of things in themselves. As Kant says, if we begin withthis idea of knowledge (he calls it “transcendental realism”), we will surelyend in skepticism. “After wrongly supposing that objects of the senses, ifthey are to be external, must have an existence by themselves, and indepen-dently of the senses, [the realist] finds that, judged from this point of view,all our sensuous representations are inadequate to establish their reality.”52 Toargue against skepticism on these terms would be to argue that our represen-tations are somehow adequate to establish the reality of objects. Instead, Kantwants to revise the idea of knowledge and the whole conceptual frameworkwhich allows the problem of skepticism to arise.When he rejects the whetherquestion about empirical knowledge in favor of the how question, he is reallyraising the what question, that of the essence of knowledge. This is the sensein which he is interested in the possibility, or conditions of possibility, of em-pirical knowledge, even though its actuality is for him never in doubt.

Kant’s revised conception of what knowledge is attacks both the subjec-tive and the objective sides of the transcendental realist position. The objec-tive side is addressed, of course, by Kant’s distinction between things inthemselves and appearances, but that distinction is possible only in connec-tion with a revised conception of the knowing process itself. This bringswith it a radically revised theory of mind and subjectivity.

The so-called way of ideas, which Kant is seeking to supplant, is a char-acterization not only of the knowing process but also of the knowing sub-ject. It is the view that the mind is a thing that has certain properties, andthese properties are thoughts, ideas, or representations. But Kant affirms, aswe have seen, that the mind must not merely have representations, it mustalso take them to be representations, and thus refer beyond themselves. Butthe tradition has no place in its theory of mind for this act of taking. Thisact is nothing other than the “I think” whereby I relate my representationsto objects by means of concepts. If we start with the traditional conception,its relation to the world has to be explained after the fact. Kant is saying thatwe must begin with a mind that is characterized by intentionality, a mindwhose essence is to refer beyond itself. Kant calls the unity of apperceptionthe “supreme principle of all employment of the understanding.”53 Thus heplaces it even above the categories. His transcendental argument for the


unity of apperception is similar to that for the categories, but it must takeprecedence over them. His argument for causality is that it cannot be derivedfrom experience, and without it experience would not be possible. Hence itmust be considered a priori and transcendental, a condition of the possibilityof experience. But causal relations are relations among objects, not represen-tations. Hence the a priori object-related (i.e., intentional) character of ex-perience establishes in general the domain to which the categories apply.

In other words, agreeing with Hume that neither reason alone nor senseexperience (in the empiricist sense) could ever guarantee the connectionbetween ideas and things, Kant concluded that the connection must be apriori. It is not to be derived from experience, but is a condition of thepossibility of experience, that the “I think” accompany all my representa-tions and in doing so relate them to objects. This, it seems to me, is the onlyway to understand Kant’s use of the terms a priori and transcendental when heapplied them to the “I think,” the unity of apperception, and the relation ofrepresentations to an object. He is saying that these constitute the veryessence of experience, and that philosophically we cannot expect to derivethem from anything simpler or more basic. Kant’s starting point is that “weare in possession” of certain cognitions, which means that we have experi-ence, in his own full-fledged sense of that term. This is Kant’s response toDescartes’ starting point and the Humean skepticism to which it ultimatelyleads. Rather than accepting that starting point and then somehow defeat-ing the skepticism it implies, Kant revises the starting point itself. Ratherthan starting with the encapsulated mind and then asking how we can getout of it to the world, we must begin with a notion of mind that is already(i.e., a priori) outside of itself and in the world.

3. Kant, Heidegger, and Husserl

This is the view of Kant’s accomplishment that Heidegger’s interpretationpermits us to see. It is not so much a matter of what Kant wanted to say asof what Kant needed to think if his work was to constitute a new contri-bution to the development of modern philosophy, a genuine turn in itscourse rather than just another “move” in its game. To play the game meansaccepting its rules; it is altogether a different thing to change the game andthus overthrow the rules. If Kant was doing the former, he was not only aless important philosopher, he was also, I think, not very successful at it.Only if he was doing the latter does he deserve the position he has been ac-corded. Which was he doing? The problem—and this Heidegger has alsoseen—is that he was doing both.

Heidegger’s attack on the quid juris derivation of the term deduction sug-gests that Kant is accepting that aspect of the modern project which is fo-

38 David Carr

cused on the refutation of skepticism with regard to empirical knowledge.This is not the only place in which Kant’s project can be read that way; theRefutation of Idealism, introduced in the second edition, contributes to thesense that the whole Analytic of Principles can be read as a series of argu-ments against skepticism. Many commentators have read Kant in this way,and of those many conclude that Kant does not succeed. But to argueagainst skepticism is to accept the presuppositions according to which skep-ticism needs a refutation. These presuppositions include a view of what ob-jects are, what the subject is, and in what knowledge consists or would orshould consist. As we have noted, Kant denounces these presuppositions un-der the heading of Transcendental Realism; but his explanation of the de-duction, Heidegger rightly points out, suggests that concepts essentially be-long to the subject and that their application to objects needs a justification.It thus runs counter to what is genuinely innovative in Kant’s theory ofconcepts and even to his basic idea of the Copernican turn. But more im-portant, the idea of “deduction” suggests a theory of the mind more inkeeping with that of Kant’s predecessors and with transcendental realism: amind which appears essentially self-enclosed whose relation to objects andto the world has to be established. In other words, it would be to accept the“way of ideas.”

Heidegger’s insight is that if Kant’s theory of the a priori is to have anysignificance, it must be more than a designation of what belongs to themind, to the exclusion of object and world. It must consist in the claim thatthe Gegenstandsbeziehung—intentionality—is essential to the mind itself, notsome external fact about it that has to be proved. But this insistence ismerely a repetition of the strategy adapted by Husserl in this regard, a strat-egy which constitutes a primary feature of Husserl’s philosophy, although itis not often recognized as such.

What is important about Husserl in this regard is not that he asserts thecentral importance of intentionality, and takes it as his theme, but ratherhow he places it in the order of philosophical priorities. The rejection ofthe “way of ideas” can be seen as the primary impetus of Husserl’s philoso-phy, from the Logical Investigations (Logische Untersuchungen) on. There, his at-tack on the empiricist theory of the mental image or representation is of apiece with his attack on psychologism in logic. Though they deal with dif-ferent domains of objects, both are attempts to collapse the object of con-sciousness into consciousness or to confuse the two. Attacking representa-tionalism, Husserl does not first assume that we have mental representationsand then ask what we need in addition that will somehow secure the ob-ject-relation, but rather shows that the idea of such representation cannot bebacked up by phenomenological description. In Ideas I (Ideen I ) he devotesa section (section 42) to what he calls the “fundamental error” of believing


that perception presents us not with a thing but only a picture of it, or per-haps a sign or symbol for it.This error draws on the common experience wehave of representations or images, as when we see pictures or photographs ofobjects. But it overlooks that here the idea of representation presupposes theidea of direct seeing, in the double sense that (1) the image depicts some-thing that could be directly seen, and (2) the image is itself directly seen andnot depicted. In spite of being “transcendent,” in the sense of belonging tothe world and not to consciousness, the object of perception is present, di-rectly given to the perceiver “in the flesh” (leibhaftig gegeben).

For Husserl it is not just the object of perception but reality as a whole,the world, that transcends consciousness in this sense. But consciousness isnot something that could be cut off from this transcendence; on the con-trary, it is as transcendent that object and world are given, indeed directlygiven to consciousness. This is because, for Husserl, consciousness, as inten-tional, is nothing that could be cut off: it consists entirely in its Gegenstands-beziehung, or Weltbezug. World and object, in turn, make no sense if we as-sume that they are cut off from the mind.

This is the view, then, that Heidegger takes over from Husserl, urging itas the proper understanding of Kant. Its primary feature is that it puts in-tentionality or Gegenstandsbeziehung first, rather than trying to establish orjustify it. In the historical sense it might be viewed as a faute de mieux or acop-out: since the pre-Kantians failed to establish the object-relation, wesimply assume it, glossing over the problem instead of actually solving it.But that would be to recognize the legitimacy of the problem. WhatHusserl and Heidegger, and to some extent Kant, have done is to unearththe assumptions on which this supposed problem depends, assumptionsabout the nature of mind, object, and world that amount to deep ontologi-cal commitments. The attempt to derive intentionality from somethingmore basic, and thus to reduce it to a confused amalgam of resemblance,causality, and logic, is characteristic not only of the pre-Kantian modernsbut also of contemporary materialists. They all share the unargued commit-ment to an ontology in which intentionality has no place and is thus ananomaly that has to be explained or justified. Husserl and Heidegger turnthe tables on this assumption, and Heidegger claims to see this happeningalready in Kant, even though Kant only fitfully recognized it.

Another aspect of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation that is indebted to, orat least strongly reminiscent of, Husserl, is his claim that Kant is kept fromrecognizing the significance of what he is doing because of methodologicallimitations. Kant wavers (schwankt) between psychology and logic, Heideg-ger says, because he fails to see any third alternative. He decides to down-play the subjective deduction and finally to jettison it altogether because hethinks it too psychological and perhaps even empirical, opting instead for a

40 David Carr

logical version of transcendental apperception as the source of unity be-tween sense and understanding. He should have envisaged the possibility ofa “phenomenological interpretation” as intermediary between psychologyand logic. Here we are reminded of Heidegger’s efforts in Being and Time todistinguish sharply between his own Daseinsanalyse and anything psycholog-ical, anthropological, or otherwise “regional” in character.

Husserl’s phenomenology, of course, emerges in the intersection betweenpsychology and logic. His efforts to articulate the distinctiveness of hismethod can be traced to his efforts to defend his Logical Investigations againstthe charge that they represented a relapse into the very psychologism hehad rejected in the first volume of the same work (this is part of his ownAuseinandersetzung with the neo-Kantians). He puts forward the idea of ametaphysically neutral description of mental activity that does not subscribeto the ontological assumptions of the psychological and the empirical. Inthe course of this development, from 1900 to 1913, he first emphasizes the“eidetic” character of phenomenology, and then begins to characterize itless as a science of essences and more as a critique of reason and as a tran-scendental philosophy. But this explicit adoption of Kantian themes goeshand in hand with a critique of Kant that anticipates Heidegger’s. He thinksthat Kant misunderstood the A-Deduction as psychological,54 replacing itby a theory of mind based on a series of arguments, even as it failed to freeitself from the dubious legacy of mental-faculty psychology. In the end hecharacterizes Kant’s theory of mind as “mythical constructions,”55 and por-trays Kant as a philosopher who was seeking but failed to find transcenden-tal phenomenology.

Husserl’s designation of his phenomenology as transcendental philosophyemerges when he begins employing the terminology of the immanent andthe transcendent in the years leading up to Ideas I. His use of the term tran-scendence and his own understanding of the meaning and derivation of theterm transcendental philosophy are evident in an early section of CartesianMeditations (Cartesianische Meditationen) (section 11), under the heading “TheTranscendence of the World”:

Neither the world nor any worldly object is a piece of my ego, to be found in my con-scious life as a really inherent part of it, as a complex of data of sensation or a com-plex of acts. . . . If this “transcendence” . . . is part of the intrinsic sense of the world,then, by way of contrast, the ego himself, who bears within him the world as an ac-cepted sense and who, in turn, is necessarily presupposed by this sense, is legitimatelycalled transcendental, in the phenomenological sense. Accordingly, the philosophicalproblems arising from this correlation are called transcendental-philosophical.56

Thus both Heidegger’s terminology of transcendence and important aspectsof his Kant interpretation have their unacknowledged origins in Husserl.


But behind both of these influences lies the much more important issue ofhow to treat transcendence (or intentionality) as a philosophical issue, an is-sue Heidegger articulates in his rejection of the “deduction” as a juridicalprocedure. Kant’s great insight was, or should have been, that we don’t haveto ask permission, as it were, to apply the categories to objects or to relatethe mind to the world. Asking “by what right” we do this is to take on aburden of proof that has dubious assumptions and that should not be ac-cepted in the first place.

It should be pointed out that the question of “right” makes a good dealmore sense as part of Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics, a topic whichHeidegger neglects, as we pointed out. The question here is to determinewhether we have the right to employ concepts of the understanding, likecausality and substance, beyond the limits of all possible experience. But theanswer to this question, in the Dialectic, is to deny us the right to so employour concepts, and so to undercut the pretensions of traditional metaphysics,rational psychology, and natural theology. Here the issue of skepticism is alsoappropriate, but Kant’s purpose is not to defeat skepticism about traditionalmetaphysical knowledge; if anything he plays the role of the skeptic himself.Thus the idea of a “deduction” of certain concepts, conceived as a questionof their legitimacy, would seem appropriate in that context. But it seemsoddly placed in the early sections of the Analytic, which is designed to dis-play the entirely legitimate employment of pure concepts within the empir-ical realm. And here Heidegger’s point, and the key to his well-founded crit-ical reading of Kant, is that the question of their legitimacy should not arise.

42 David Carr

1.Transcendental Philosophy and Intentionality

According to Kant, transcendental philosophy embodies the kind of knowl-edge “by which we know that—and how—certain representations . . . canbe employed or are possible purely a priori”; that is, “such knowledge asconcerns the a priori possibility of knowledge, or its a priori employment.”1

In Kant’s language, to say that a representation is “possible” is equivalent tosaying that it can be “employed,” and that, in turn, is equivalent to sayingthat it has “content,” that is,“relation to [an] object.”2 All representations, assuch, purport to have content, but not all of them do. In showing “that andhow” representations can have content, transcendental philosophy is con-cerned with the issue of intentionality, with showing that entities in theworld are there for us, how our mental life discloses what there is. At first,however, its approach to this issue seems restricted to showing “that andhow” certain representations can have a relation to objects “purely a pri-ori”—that is, without reference to any experience in which objects can begiven. In this sense, transcendental philosophy specifically concerns the in-tentionality of reason, where reason is the power of producing representa-tions whose purported content does not derive from experience. How canrepresentations that have their seat purely in thinking be shown to have arelation to an object? Kant answers that this is possible only if the contentof such representations can be shown to be the condition for the possibilityof intentionality as such, that is, only if it makes “objects”—entities that are

chapter

Conscience and Reasonheidegger and the grounds

of intentionality

Steven Crowell

4

there for us—possible. In fact, then, the Critique of Pure Reason’s approach tothe question of intentionality is not at all restricted. By showing that andhow certain representations are employable a priori it shows how any rep-resentation could have relation to an object at all.

I have opened this chapter with some well-known features of Kant’s en-terprise in order to specify a context for what looks, on the face of it, to bea somewhat quixotic task—namely, to argue that Heidegger’s fundamentalontology is concerned precisely with the question that concerned Kant:how does reason make intentionality possible? It is clear that Heidegger aimsto give an account of intentionality (he says so in many places),3 but itseems equally clear that the account turns not on reason but on the under-standing of being (Seinsverständnis). More concretely, Heidegger traces thepossibility of encountering entities as entities not, as does Kant, to the self-determining spontaneity of transcendental apperception, the “I think,” butto the thrown-projective “care” structure of Dasein as being-in-the-world.For Heidegger, what Kant mistakenly attributes to reason has deeper roots,and though Kant may succeed in uncovering conditions for a certain kindof intentionality (the regional ontology of nature as the occurrent), this isaccomplished only by concealing those deeper roots through an aporeticapproach to the “subject” as something equally occurrent. It is not reason,then—the power of combining representations into judgments, the powerof subsuming representations under rules, or drawing inferences—that ex-plains how entities show up for us, but rather Dasein’s “transcendence,” its“projection of possibilities for being its self ” in light of which things canshow themselves as what they are.

I do not wish to contradict the claim that Heidegger advances the tradi-tion of transcendental philosophy beyond Kant precisely by recognizing thatcare is ontologically prior to reason, that Dasein’s transcendence is theground of self-consciousness. But I shall argue that just this priority of careover reason and self-consciousness provides a better explanation of reason’scontribution to the account of intentionality. Unlike the transcendentalunity of apperception, the care structure involves an inner articulation, andmy aim is to show reason’s place within it.

Here, however, lies a second objection. For though the care structure isinternally articulated, reason is apparently not one of its elements. Whetherone takes care to involve “existentiality, facticity, and falling” or “understand-ing, disposition, and discourse,” reason is conspicuously absent.4 Indeed, it haslong been assumed that Heidegger’s ontology occludes reason. For some—those who applaud Heidegger’s frequent remarks dismissing ratio, Vernunft, as“the most stiff-necked adversary of thought”5—this occlusion is a welcomedeparture in the dreary history of Western rationalism. For others—thosewho associate the putative absence of reason with dangers best emblema-

44 Steven Crowell

tized by Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism—the occlusion issymptomatic of the general failure of Heidegger’s position. For these crit-ics, Heidegger’s attempt to subordinate reason to care ends with his failureto do justice to the normative aspects of our experience.

The classic formulation of this objection is found in Der Wahrheitsbegriff beiHusserl und Heidegger (The Concept of Truth in Husserl and Heidegger), whereErnst Tugendhat claims that in Heidegger’s attempt to ground propositionaltruth in the “more primordial” truth of Dasein’s disclosedness “the specificsense of ‘truth’ is lost.”6 The predicate true properly applies to propositionsbecause they can be assessed in terms of a distinction between correct andincorrect, measured against the entity as it is in itself. Heidegger argues thatfor an entity to serve as such a measure it must show up in a holistic con-text of significance (“world”) that has been disclosed in advance, a dis-closedness he terms “ontological truth.” Such truth does not stand in nor-mative relation to falsity but to “closed-off-ness.” However,Tugendhat ar-gues that because Heidegger provides no explanation of what governs thisdistinction in the way that appeals to the entity as it is in itself governs thedistinction between correctness and incorrectness, it is pseudonormative:rather than being something assessable in terms of success or failure, dis-closedness is something that merely occurs. As a condition for any encounterwith entities, disclosedness provides a “conditio sine qua non,” but the “specificsense of the truth relation”—its distinctive normativity—“is not clarified.”7

Tugendhat deems a failure Heidegger’s attempt to define the normativecontent of disclosedness by means of the concept of authenticity, a judgmentthat is followed by many. In the following reading of Heidegger’s remarks onconscience—which is where the ontology of reason is to be found—I willargue that Tugendhat and others miss the point. First, however, I will con-sider in somewhat more detail a few objections to Heidegger’s approach.

2. Robert Pippin’s Criticisms

Let us begin by considering what any explanation of intentionality must pro-vide. Intentionality is philosophically perplexing because by means of it weare not simply in causal interaction with entities but have to do with them assomething. One way to get at this distinction is to say that to be involvedwith something “as” something is to be governed by the conditions that thething must satisfy in order to be what it is taken to be. This means that inten-tionality is a normative notion, governed by conditions of success or failure.For instance, for me to experience something as a pen (for it to be the “inten-tional content” of my “state”), I must be responsive to the rules which consti-tute something as a pen.8 Stating what these rules are can be difficult—in-deed, whether they can be stated at all is a matter of some dispute—but only if

Conscience and Reason 45

it is true that in the face of the thing’s failure to live up to (some of ) its satis-faction conditions I would admit that my experience “had not been” of a pen,I could not have been involved with it as a pen at all.

Now Heidegger appears to have an account of this sort of normativity.In keeping with his rejection of a Cartesian subject whose mental states de-termine the content of its experience, Heidegger locates the norms govern-ing intentionality not in the individual subject’s representations but in socialpractices. Before being an individual subject, Dasein is a socialized One (dasMan), constituted by what is “average” (the normal) and thereby caught up inwhat is normative.9 It is because I conform to the way “one” does thingsthat entities can become available to me as appropriate and so “as” pens,shoes, eating utensils, and the like. Such normativity simply arises in thecourse of practices; it is not the result of (and hence not explicable in termsof ) reason. Intentionality rests not upon a transcendental logic but upon thede facto normativity of practices.

Robert Pippin, however, has questioned the adequacy of this account, ar-guing that it explains only how we act in accord with norms, when whatreally needs explaining is how we can act in light of them. By emphasizing“mindless” conformism over any “quasi-intentional features of taking up orsustaining a practice,”10 this interpretation conceals a moment of self-con-scious agency that has not been given its due: even to say that I am con-forming to a norm is to say more than that my behavior just happens.When Heidegger suggests that in practices I “let” things “be involved,” thisimplies more than simply using things appropriately; it implies that I usethem “in light of such appropriateness.” Social practices are such that onecan be doing them only if one takes oneself to be doing them.11 The Kant-ian rationalist will explain the distinction between acting merely in accordwith norms (conformism) and acting in light of them by appealing to self-legislation or pure practical reason, and Pippin acknowledges that Heideg-ger’s rejection of such rationalism has some plausibility: “We do of courseinherit and pass on much unreflectively, or at least in a way that makes thelanguage of self-imposition and justification look highly idealized.”12 Nev-ertheless he requires that Heidegger provide some account of “the internalstructure of . . . sustaining and reflecting” social practices, without whichwe cannot distinguish acting in accord with norms from acting in light ofthem. Because Heidegger does not provide such an account, his appeal tosociality is ultimately aporetic.13

Pippin recognizes that such an account should be given in Division Twoof Being and Time, but he believes that “the themes of anxiety, guilt, the callof conscience, authenticity, and resoluteness do not shed much light” on theproblem. Because they represent a “total” breakdown of the seamless con-formity to the norms grounded in das Man, they provide merely an “inde-

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terminate negation” of the conformist self, one that reveals no positive re-sources for a normatively oriented “sustaining and reflecting” of inheritednorms.14 In short, Heidegger lacks an adequate concept of self-conscious-ness in Hegel’s sense: because these chapters present Dasein’s authentic dis-closedness not as something it works toward by “reasoning, reflecting, con-testation with others” but as an “original event,” Dasein’s authenticity, its“‘acting for the sake of its own possibility,’ cannot be rightly understood asacting on, or ‘having’ reasons, as if it came to its ends, or could come to themas its own, only by virtue of such reasons. This would be a secondary mani-festation for Heidegger and would suggest an unacceptably subjectivist un-derstanding of such activity (as if the subject were the ‘origin’).”15 Thus, onPippin’s reading, Heidegger’s position offers nothing but the mindless socialconformism of the One, the “arch, defensive neo-positivism” of a disclosiveevent that simply reifies “mentalités, epistemes, ‘discourses,’ ‘fields of power,’and so on.”16

But is it true that Division Two of Being and Time sheds no light on thisproblem? Can the existential analyses of anxiety, conscience, and resolute-ness really be relegated to the scrap heap of “indeterminate negation”? Pip-pin challenges us to look again at these chapters to see whether they mightyield something like a notion of normative self-consciousness—somethingthat would illuminate what it means to act in light of norms, or to act onreasons, without implying (as Pippin, following Hegel, does) that authenticdisclosedness must be a consequence of deliberation, or “reasoning, reflecting,contestation with others.” Perhaps critics have been putting the wrongquestion to these chapters, one that conceals the place that reason alreadyoccupies there.

3. Ernst Tugendhat’s Criticisms

It is in fact possible to identify precisely where the wrong question getsasked if we return to Tugendhat. Elaborating the critical insight underlyinghis Wahrheitsbegriff, Tugendhat has argued that “the moral, and indeed thenormative in general, does not appear” in Being and Time. Of course, dasMan involves a kind of normativity, but this is entirely “conventional,” andso, he argues, compatible with Dasein’s being “hardwired” for it. True nor-mativity is distinguished from the conventional precisely in that it involves“a claim to grounding,” and so includes a “specific depth dimension” of de-liberation and reason-giving.17 Corresponding to this is the existential con-dition of Eigenständigkeit (literally,“independence”), a kind of freedom con-stituted by a concern for this depth dimension of reasons. Just this,Tugend-hat argues, is absent from Being and Time: “it emerges that of the threecrucial concepts that were mentioned—deliberation, reasons, norms—not a


single one is found in Sein und Zeit; they neither occur there, nor is thereanything remotely resembling them.”18 The individuality and freedom re-quired for deliberation do appear in connection with authenticity, but it isprecisely there that no trace of deliberation and reasoning is to be found; in-deed “resoluteness excludes deliberation.”19 Hence Being and Time providesno account of the depth dimension of reasons.

But just where should we expect reason and deliberation to show up inan account of resoluteness? Deliberation concerns the reasons for what I do,considers which possibilities are “better grounded.”20 Tugendhat distinguishesbetween two levels at which the call for deliberation might arise. At the firstlevel—that of moral and prudential deliberation—I consider the relativeweight that a given desire should have in the order of my willing. Though Ideliberate as an individual, my appeal to reason here ensures that my answerwill remain general—an expression of how one should live. At the secondlevel, however—that of authenticity as Tugendhat interprets it—it is my setof desires as a whole that is at stake, and I am faced with the question of howI should live: in the face of death I ponder whether I have really lived my lifeor whether life has passed me by. Heidegger’s account of resoluteness is saidto address this issue. In what sense, then, does it exclude deliberation?

First, there is the trivial sense in which Heidegger’s text offers no ac-count of prudential and moral deliberation, but since Tugendhat correctlysees that authenticity is “not equivalent to the question of what is morallyright,”21 one cannot infer that Being and Time’s ontology excludes such anaccount. Instead, Tugendhat argues that the question to which resolutechoice is the answer excludes deliberation, noting that the question of whatmy life means (who I should be) is not the sort of thing on which delibera-tion can get a grip. The very singularity of the question seems to excludethe publicity and universality of reason-giving. Because there is no “depthdimension of reasons” to appeal to here,Tugendhat suggests that “ultimateenlightenment lies in realizing the senselessness of the question.”22 Hetherefore heaps scorn on what he takes to be Heidegger’s appeal to guiltand conscience as ersatz norms that would substitute for the impossibility ofdeliberation.23 But what if these notions are not intended to supply nonra-tional standards for a choice where reason can no longer be invoked—thatis, in relation to the ontic question of who I should be? What if they servethe ontological function of clarifying how any answer to that ontic questionbrings with it an orientation toward reasons, thus making deliberation possi-ble? In that case, Heidegger’s identification of resoluteness with existentialtruth would not, as Tugendhat believes, amount to “an attempt to banishreason from human existence, particularly from the relation of oneself tooneself,”24 but would rather be the account of why reason belongs to thatrelation.

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Tugendhat claims that though Heidegger’s concept of resolute choiceappears to be an irrational decisionism, it must nevertheless, if it is to be achoice, remain tacitly supported by an orientation toward reasons. A gen-uine choice “must be able to rest upon justification, that is, it is grounded inthe question of truth, even though it cannot be fully resolved in this ques-tion.”25 Heidegger’s clinging to the notion of existential truth is said to begrudging acknowledgment of this. But what sort of grounding is it thatorients choice toward truth and justification even though it cannot be “fullyresolved in this question”? How do I come to be so oriented; how do I enterinto the depth dimension of reasons? Just this—and not the question of howI should live my life—is at stake in Heidegger’s ontological discussion ofconscience. Consider the issue from another angle:Tugendhat argues thatone who deliberates morally seeks those reasons for acting that are reasonsfor everyone, that is, to do that which everyone would be justified in doing.This means that the deliberator is one for whom this “universal justifiabilityhas become a motive,” and, as Tugendhat notes, how such a thing can be-come a motive “is not self-evident.”26 Before the ontologist delves into thepractice of moral deliberation, then, he might well wish to understand howthe actor comes to be concerned with reasons at all. If Tugendhat is right thatHeidegger has little to say about the first, he misses the fact that Heideggerhas much to say about the second.The chapter on conscience does not sup-ply ersatz criteria for an otherwise irrational choice: it articulates our capac-ity for entering into the space of reasons.

4. Locating Reason in Being and Time

Can such an assertion—which certainly does not sound very Heidegger-ian—be supported by the text of Being and Time? It can, but the evidencewill require a good deal of unpacking. In explicating his “formalized” con-cept of guilt, Heidegger writes: “The self, which as such has to lay theground [Grund] for itself, can never get that ground into its power; and yet ithas to take over being the ground existingly [existierend].” In case this is notcrystal clear, Heidegger goes on to explain: Dasein is “not through itself, but[is] released to itself from the ground, in order to be as this [ground]. Daseinis not itself the ground of its being, insofar as this [ground] first springs fromits own projection; but as being-a-self [Selbstsein] it is indeed the being of theground. This ground is always only ground of an entity whose being has totake over being-a-ground.”27

The burden of my argument is to show that “taking over being-a-ground” must be understood as including a reference to ground as reason.First, however, two preliminary comments are in order, one concerningtranscendental philosophy, the other what is to be understood by “reason.”


As Carl-Friedrich Gethmann has shown, this passage represents the cruxof Heidegger’s transformation of the transcendental philosophy of Kant,Fichte, and Husserl; here the transcendental subject, as care, is conceived notas “the constituting entity but as the entity that facilitates [vollziehend] consti-tution.” In contrast to the transcendental subject in Fichte (and Husserl),Dasein’s “primal act” is “not the positing of itself as positing, but rather thepositing of itself as posited.”28 As our passage indicates, Dasein, as thrown,must acknowledge a ground from which it is “released to itself,” and whichis, in Gethmann’s term,“out of reach” (unverfügbar). Thus, as Gethmann ex-plains, Dasein “presents [stellt dar] the ground for all entities (positing) and isitself grounded [begründet] by means of the ground.”29

At first glance this threatens to annul the transcendental point of departurealtogether. If the so-called transcendental subject is itself grounded in some-thing out of reach—whether reified epistemes, power structures, or capital-BBeing—won’t the ground that it presents for intentionality simply have thecharacter of a fact? What will keep dogmatism and skepticism from resumingtheir eternal dialectic? Haven’t we simply generated another version of Tu-gendhat’s criticism, namely, that Heidegger’s ontology allows no room for thenormativity of reason?30 To respond to this worry it is necessary to recognizethat the passage in question entails two distinct notions of ground: ground asfacticity and ground as reason.31 Taking over being-a-ground—where “being”must be understood existentially as ability-to-be—names the point at whichDasein becomes accountable: the factic ground that remains out of reach isreflected in a normative project of grounding (accountability) that first makespossible something like reasons.

What, then, is to be understood by “reason”? The link between the ideaof conscience as taking over being-a-ground and the concept of ground asreason is to be found in the character of conscience as a call, that is, in itscharacter as discourse. For reason has a double connection to discourse. First,reasoning is a discursive practice in which something is offered or given—sup-port for one’s judgment, justification for one’s behavior. Second, that whichis given, the reason, is itself something that, in Tugendhat’s translation ofT. M. Scanlon’s phrase, speaks for something else—not in the sense of speak-ing in place of something but in the sense of telling in favor of it.32 Corre-sponding to this double connection is a double normativity: first, as a prac-tice, reason-giving, like all practices, depends on constitutive rules that deter-mine what counts as success or failure; and second, what is given in thispractice itself stands in a normative relation to something, namely, that forwhich it supplies a reason.33

The attempt to link conscience to reason by means of its character as acall—that is, as a mode of discourse—may seem unpromising if we recallcertain passages about discourse in Being and Time. Everywhere Heidegger

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seems keen to disassociate language from reason—to “liberate grammar fromlogic,” as he puts it (209/165). Far from seeing an intimate connection be-tween discourse and reason, such as one might find in contemporary at-tempts to link linguistic meaning to truth conditions or to spell out the se-mantics of language with the help of logic, Heidegger argues that the logi-cal forms of language—apophansis, predicative assertion—are parasitical on amore primordial sense of logos as “letting be seen.” Further,“assertion is nota free-floating kind of behavior which, in its own right, might be capable ofdisclosing entities . . . in a primary way” (157/199). Primordial disclosure is,rather, a function of Dasein’s pre-predicative involvements.34 However, thethesis being advanced here is not that the call of conscience is itself a modeof discourse that speaks for something else, a practice of reason-giving thatemploys predicative assertion. The claim is, rather, that the discourse of con-science is the ontological condition of that practice that explains its doublenormativity: the rule of accountability inherent in the practice of giving andthe rule of legitimation that underlies speaking for something. To flesh outthis claim—and so to read our initial passage with more insight—we mustlocate conscience within the structure of Dasein’s being, care, as a whole.

5. Conscience and the Structure of Care

Discourse (Rede) is one of the three existential structures that go to makeup Dasein’s disclosedness, that is, that account ontologically for the fact thatI am “in” a “world,” a context of significance within which things can beencountered in all the ways they are so encountered. The other two struc-tures are disposition (Befindlichkeit) and understanding (Verstehen). Together,these three make up the framework of Heidegger’s account of intentional-ity. The broad outlines of Heidegger’s position are well known, so I willonly mention them. First, disposition is that aspect of my being thanks towhich things matter to me. I do not inhabit a world in which things aremerely arranged around me in neutral fashion; rather, they have a particularsalience, they are alluring or repelling or irritating. This is because I am pre-sent to myself not first of all through a theoretical reflection but alwaysthrough the “feeling” of my own having-to-be. I can be disposed in variousways but I am never without some mood. Second, understanding is not amental operation but a sein-können, an “ability-to-be,” a skill or know-how,which Heidegger terms the “projection of possibilities for being.” It is becauseI possess such skills and abilities that I can encounter things in their possibili-ties—that is, that things can prove useful or appropriate for the tasks in whichI am engaged. Understanding in this sense yields a teleologically structured“relevance totality”—things are there “in order to” accomplish some specificend, which in turn appears as something in order to accomplish some further


end—a totality that is anchored in an “end in itself,” referred back to thebeing who acts “for the sake of ” what it is (practical identity). Discourse,thirdly, is what Heidegger calls the “articulation of intelligibility”—namely,the articulation of that intelligibility that has its roots in disposition and un-derstanding.Though disposition and understanding are necessary conditionsfor intentionality, they are not sufficient. For things to be significant theymust not merely be useful for something but also tellable: what I am doingmust be able to be named. Only so is it possible that things can show up aswhat they are, and without this “as”—one that encodes the normative senseof the “proper” in any given world—we do not have intentionality.

Heidegger initially describes care in its “everyday” modality and arguesthat the self of everyday being-in-the-world is the One (das Man). That is,what makes up the significance of the world into which I am geared is notsome content that belongs to my consciousness, in terms of which I repre-sent the world; rather, it belongs to the “public,” the always historically andculturally particular social practices of those among whom I find myself. Iconduct myself as “one” does in the roles I adopt, and in telling myself andothers what I am up to, I speak as one does:“the ‘One’ itself articulates thereferential context of significance” (167/129).The conformism that this pic-ture of everyday Dasein evokes correlates to another aspect of everydayness,namely, that my way of gearing into the world is not a function of delibera-tion but rather a “mindless” coping in which my abilities take the lead. Tosay that everydayness is mindless is not, however, to say that it is opaque. Onthe contrary, it is precisely “cleared” (gelichtet): a necessary condition for thepossibility of encountering things as meaningful is the habitual conformityto public norms, to the normal and average, and to the name.

Although my everyday gearing into the world is not a function of delib-eration, deliberation, as a kind of practice, must find its ontological clarifica-tion at the level of the One. Heidegger analyzes the way that disturbances inthe smooth flow of my activities can occasion a transition in my dealingswith things: from their being “available” things become merely “occurrent”;accordingly, I no longer simply deal with them but rather—at the extreme—merely stare at them. Such disturbances provide the occasion for delibera-tion—that is, for technical, strategic, and prudential consideration of what isto be done. It must be possible, therefore, to give an ontological account ofdeliberation as a specific modification of the care structure.35 Appreciation of this point allows us to see why the everyday one-self is a necessary, butnot a sufficient, condition for intentionality.

First, when I deliberate about how to go on I do so in terms of somedisposition.Things (including my own beliefs and desires) will present them-selves as salient, as “weighty” or not, according to how I am disposed. Upondeliberation I may be less likely simply to act on the faces that things show

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me according to my mood than I would be when absorbed in worldly af-fairs, but this is simply because the project of deliberation is to deliberateabout my action. If I am finally moved to act “in spite of ” the way I feelabout things, “because” it is called for or reasonable, this will only be be-cause I am so disposed that I can feel the weight of the reasons brought for-ward. Second, deliberation involves making explicit what belongs to under-standing—the particular in-order-to relations grounded in the specific for-the-sake-of that informs my smoothly functioning practice. I make theseelements explicit to the extent that I am able, and I consider them as indica-tions of how to go on. Such explication is, finally, discursive: I articulatecourses of action, weighing evidence and considering reasons for going onin one way or another. The significant thing to note is that deliberationtakes place (as did the action from which it arose) within the constitutiverules of the “world” in which I remain engaged. That is, I deliberate as thatwhich I was understanding myself to be, in terms of my “practical identity”as husband, as teacher, as American citizen. Thus, while only an individualcan deliberate, I do not deliberate as my ownmost self. Rather, the reasons Iadduce and the evidence that I find salient will normally be those typical ofthe current cultural, historical composition of the One. I deliberate in or-der to restore equilibrium in a context that otherwise remains fixed; I con-sider things in light of how one ought to go on.This does not mean that myreasoning is nothing but the rationalization of specific cultural conditions,but it does mean that the practice of deliberation, like all practices, isgrounded ontologically in what is public, typical, and normative in a givencommunity. That deliberation is explicitly oriented toward “reasons for”does not, ontologically, get us any further than the analysis of everyday cop-ing. For in spite of its being a product of a disturbance in the smooth flowof my comportment in the world, adjusting to the world, deliberation doesnot disclose any aspect of myself that would not already be governed by thepublic, anonymous One.36

Heidegger does, however, consider a more extreme possibility—not thedisturbance of everyday coping but its complete breakdown—in which theself is explicitly called into question as a self. Here deliberation is impossiblebecause the everyday world on which it depends “has the character of com-pletely lacking significance” (231/186). Yet it is only in light of this liminalmode of being that the sufficient condition of intentionality—the possibil-ity of a genuinely first-person stance—is made evident. As I shall argue, theaccount of conscience that finds its place here articulates what it means tosay “I,” such that I—and not only some “one”—have, and can have, reasonsabout which I deliberate; it explains how one’s reasons can be my reasons.For Heidegger, conscience is not itself a kind of private reason but an on-tological condition for distinguishing between external and internal reasons,


between a quasi-mechanical conformism and a commitment responsive tothe normativity of norms.

The liminal condition of breakdown is a modification of the care struc-ture and thus involves the three elements of disposition, understanding, anddiscourse. As the sort of discourse that belongs to this modification, con-science will articulate the intelligibility of the self as disclosed through theother two elements: the disposition of Angst and its corresponding mode ofunderstanding, death. For our purposes what matters most about these con-troversial analyses is the way “everyday familiarity collapses,” so that Daseinis “brought face to face with itself as being-in-the-world” (233/188).

Anxiety is a distinctive disposition because it neutralizes the claims thingsnormally exert on me and so also the reasons they provide for what I do.Anxiety “tells us that entities are not ‘relevant’ at all” (231/186). This doesnot mean that significance and reasons disappear; I still register their de-mands, but they no longer grip me. As Heidegger puts it elsewhere, anxietyreveals the “strangeness” of the fact “that they are beings—and not noth-ing”; beings are simply there, inert.37 This is because, second, anxiety doesnot “concern a definite kind of being for Dasein or a definite possibility forit” but rather “discloses Dasein as being-possible as such” (232/187–88).Thingsbecome insignificant, reasons lose their grip, just because I am no longerdrawn into the world in terms of some definite possibility, some specificpractical identity. “We ourselves . . . slip away from ourselves,”38 and withthat go the constitutive rules that, belonging to our roles and practices, pro-vide the terms in which I understand how to go on. Without these, I amable neither to act nor to deliberate. Conceived as a mode of understanding(ability-to-be), this being individuated down to my sheer “being-possible”is, as William Blattner has shown, an “in-ability-to-be”—that is, “death” asthe “possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there” (294/250).39 Death isnot a matter of bodily demise but an existential condition in which I am nolonger able to gear into the world in terms of roles and practices, with theresult that things have properties but no affordances, and the motives andreasons the latter once supplied now take on the character of somethingcloser to simple facts, items in the world of which I can take note butwhich do not move me.The question that arises here is not how they couldever have been valid for me (as the one-self I am defined by such validity),but how they could be valid for me now—that is, for the one who gen-uinely says “I.” How can any reason be my reason?

This question, I claim, is answered by the mode of discourse that articu-lates the intelligibility of breakdown, namely, the call of conscience. What is“given to understand” in the call? Heidegger answers: “guilty” (schuldig)—but such guilt cannot be explained with reference to any law, whether con-

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ventional, rational/moral, or divine. Because conscience articulates a condi-tion in which such laws have ceased to make any claim on me and persistmerely as facts, inert items that lack normative force, what I am given tounderstand about myself in conscience cannot be explained through trans-gression of them. Heidegger expresses this by saying that the term guilt mustbe “formalized” so that “all reference to law, ought, and social relations dropsout” (328/283). But can the notion of guilt make sense without reference toany law or ought? Owing something to someone is more than simply pos-sessing what he once possessed; rather, a law or norm governing exchangesmust be in place. But Heidegger’s formalization is meant to bring out a fur-ther ontological point, namely, that my relation to such a law or norm mustbe of a certain character. If I am incapable of placing myself under the law—as may occur through various mental or physical incapacities—then I cannotbe said to owe something. Angst in Heidegger’s sense reveals something like aglobal incapacity vis-à-vis the normativity of all laws and oughts: existingnorms present themselves as mere facts; they have no more normative forcethan does the code of Hammurabi. It may be true that a valid law obligatesme whether or not I recognize it, but the point of Heidegger’s formalizationis to highlight the way law and ought can come to have standing from thefirst-person point of view.

Thus the role the analysis of guilt is to play is relatively clear. To say that“this ‘Guilty!’ turns up as a predicate for the ‘I am’” (326/281) means that itbelongs to my radically individualized mode of being, independent of anygrasp of myself as this or that (including as rational being or as believer).Further, what conscience gives to understand thereby is “the ontologicalcondition for Dasein’s ability to come to owe anything in factically exist-ing” (332/288). Heidegger thus examines conscience in order to explainhow I can come to be obligated. Since there is no question about how onecomes to be obligated (the one-self simply conforms to constitutive rules),Heidegger’s concern here is to show how, given the fact that the one-self canbreak down, something like a responsiveness to norms as norms is possible.If that is so, we have the context necessary for understanding our initial text,since Heidegger offers it to unpack his formalized definition of guilt as “be-ing the ground of a nullity” (329/283).That context, as John Haugeland cor-rectly sees, is Heidegger’s account of responsibility, for which reason Hauge-land translates schuldig not as “guilty” but as “responsible”—in the sense bothof “at fault/culpable and obliged/indebted/liable.”40Yet “being the ground ofa nullity” signifies responsibility in a further sense not noted by Haugeland:that of being answerable (verantwortlich) (334/288). To see how this discursivesense is already at stake in our passage is to understand how conscience pro-vides an ontological condition for reason.


To make that case I will argue, first, that conscience accounts for howgrounds become reasons, in the sense of “my” reasons—that is, that con-science explains my ability to act not just in accord with, but also in light of,norms; and second, that the notion of resoluteness, as the authentic responseto the call of conscience, entails the project of giving reasons (to oneself andto the other).

6. Being-Guilty and the Space of Reasons

As a “predicate for the ‘I am,’” being-guilty as “being the ground of a nul-lity” is not the simple state of an occurrent entity but a way of existing, amodification of the care structure.The complexity of Heidegger’s attempt toexplain such being-a-ground arises from the fact that the notion of grounditself is twofold, thanks to the two equiprimordial aspects of Dasein’s being,thrownness and projection.

Heidegger first introduces the notion of ground in terms of Dasein’sthrownness: Dasein has “not laid that ground itself,” and yet “it reposes in theweight of it, which is made manifest to it as a burden” in its mood(330/284). What does “ground” mean here? Formally, as Gethmann ob-served, it is simply what is out of reach (unverfügbar), that which the tran-scendental subject must posit itself as being posited by. Less formally, how-ever, several attempts to specify such a ground have been made. Heideggersometimes suggests that it be conceived as “nature” (or “cosmos”), as dasÜbermächtige—which leads, perhaps, to some form of theological concep-tion.41 Gadamer suggests that this dimension of Dasein’s ground is languageand tradition, which is always “mehr Sein als Bewußtsein.”42 Dreyfus glossesthe notion by appeal to background practices belonging to one’s sociocul-tural milieu.43 We need not decide the merits of any of these suggestions,since our concern is with what it might mean to be grounded in any ofthese ways, and my claim is that such grounds, to the extent that they remainout of reach, cannot be conceived as reasons. This is clear if the factic groundis conceived as nature, for to say that I am grounded in nature is to say that Ifind myself within a causal nexus over which I have no control: the forcesof nature that cooperate in ensuring that I do what I do cannot be confusedwith the reasons why I do it. Nature in this sense lies outside the space ofreasons because its constraint on me is not normatively assessable; it simplyis or is not.

Something similar holds if the ground is conceived either as history, tra-dition, or social practices—so long as we insist, with Heidegger, that it func-tions as factic ground precisely to the extent that it is out of reach. Forthough we can see that social practices, for instance, must be understood

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normatively—that is, that they involve reasons in the sense of an in-order-toand a for-the-sake-of and so are assessable in terms of success or failure—itis not from the point of view of one’s everyday coping that we make thisjudgment. The agent functions within the nexus of such practices in muchthe way that she functions within the constraints of nature: she acts in ac-cord with norms but not in light of them; hence such behavior is largelypredictable from a third-person point of view. This is the picture of thefunctioning of norms within social practices we get from Division One ofBeing and Time, where it is difficult to distinguish human from animal teleo-logical action.44 Though we might be willing to describe animal behavior as being based on reasons, such reasons would be external: there are reasonsfor what Larry Bird does on the court, just as there are reasons for what the wasp does, but neither does them for those reasons, in light of them. InAngst—which is possible for Bird but not for the wasp—this differencecomes to awareness: that in whose grip I was when geared into the worldnow confronts me as an inert fact, something without normative force.

Robert Pippin is surely right to object that this strikes a false note as apicture of human meaningful activity, but this is not an objection to Hei-degger. For the latter, we are never simply grounded by the sort of thrownground disclosed in mood; instead, though Dasein “can never get thatground into its power,” it “has to take over being the ground existingly”(330/284). In the structure of my being as care, my facticity is always rami-fied by my existentiality—that is, my “projection of possibilities for being aself.”What does “ground” mean when it is ramified by existentiality? Theanswer must be given at an appropriately formalized level. Recall that inAngst the concern is not for a “definite kind of being for Dasein or a definitepossibility for it,” but rather for “being-possible as such” (232/187). Thus,taking over the ground existingly may be described formally as a “possibi-lizing” of the factic ground: what the call of conscience gives to understandis that that which I can never get into my power—what grounds me be-yond my reach—is nevertheless my possibility.This, I suggest, can only meanthat factic grounds become subject to a choice for which I am accountable;they are thereby taken up into the normative space of reasons.

The argument for this remains largely implicit in Being and Time. However,in the 1929 essay “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (“On the Essence of Ground”),Heidegger provides a crucial clarification of how factic grounds enter thespace of reasons when Dasein takes over being-a-ground.45 The essay followsBeing and Time in arguing that the in-order-to relations informing Dasein’spractical dealings with things are anchored in Dasein’s self-awareness as that“for-the-sake-of-which” (Umwillen) it is so engaged.This possibility for being(or ability-to-be) discloses a totality of significance (“world”) in terms of


which entities can “gain entry into world”—show themselves in their possi-bilities—and thereby “come to be ‘more in being’” (EG, 123). We shouldunderstand this “more” as entities’ being held up to constitutive standards,and the essay makes clear what Being and Time did not, namely, that theworldhood that makes such standards possible is grounded in the normativeorientation of Dasein’s first-person self-awareness. Heidegger here calls thisorientation “sovereignty.”

In 1929 Heidegger glossed the care structure—transcendence of beingstoward their being—with the Platonic notion of an epekeina tes ousias: a “be-yond beings.”This suggests that transcendence is connected with the Good,so Heidegger asks: “May we interpret the agathon as the transcendence ofDasein” (EG, 124)? According to Heidegger, Plato’s agathon is “that hexis(sovereign power) that is sovereign with respect to the possibility (in thesense of the enabling) of truth, understanding, and even being.” Such “sover-eignty,” however, also describes the Umwillen of resolute, individuated Dasein.Thus the “essence of the agathon lies in [Dasein’s] sovereignty over itself ashou heneka—as the ‘for the sake of . . . ’, it is the source of possibility as such”(EG, 124). By thus equating authentic Umwillen with the ancient hou henekaand its orientation toward the good or what is “best,” Heidegger lets us seethat to “possibilize” factic grounds by taking over being-a-ground is to act inlight of a normative distinction between better and worse. By grasping my sit-uation in the normative light of what is best, the factic grounds into which Iam thrown become reasons for which I am responsible.46

To take over being-a-ground, then—that is, to possibilize what groundsme—is to transform the claims of nature or society (what “one” simplydoes) into first-person terms, into my reasons for doing what I do. Con-science discloses that I am a being for whom thrown grounds can neverfunction simply as causes: because Dasein has been “released from theground, not through itself but to itself, so as to be as this [ground]” (330/285),grounds take on the character of reasons for which I am accountable. Mynatural impulses are not within my power, but it is I who make them nor-mative for me, make them reasons for what I do. My gearing into the worldmust take place in terms of social practices whose rules are not within mypower and so function essentially as grounds in the sense of causes. How-ever, it is I who transform such functional effectuation into reasons for be-ing—namely, by answering for them as possibilities. If conscience articulatesthe intelligibility of the first-person stance that emerges in the collapse ofthe one-self, Heidegger’s gloss of the call in terms of schuldig-sein identifiesthe ontological condition whereby one’s (factic) grounds become my (nor-mative) reasons and thus explains how Dasein can act not only in accordwith norms but also in light of them.

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7. Being-Guilty and Giving Reasons

There is a further aspect to the project whereby Dasein enters into the spaceof reasons through the possibilizing of factic grounds. Heidegger terms sucha project “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit), defined as “the self-projectionupon one’s ownmost being-guilty” (343/297). To “hear” the call of con-science “correctly is . . . tantamount to having an understanding of oneselfin one’s ownmost potentiality for being” (333/287)—that is, to be guilty, totake over being-a-ground. With the help of “On the Essence of Ground” wehave understood resoluteness as sovereignty, as Dasein’s awareness of itself asbeing-possible, acting for the sake of what is best (agathon). But what be-longs to such an ability-to-be? On the one hand, I cannot improve on theanswer that John Haugeland has provided in terms of his notion of “exis-tential commitment.”To be resolved is to take responsibility for the stan-dards inherent in the practices in which I am engaged; only so is it possiblefor there to be practices rather than mere occurrences. For instance, if some-thing can be a rook only because there is a practice, chess, in which it countsas such a thing, the idea of “counting” itself depends on my commitment tothe game, without which the standards that determine success or failuremight have normative authority but would lack normative force. This is notto say that, lacking my commitment, there could be no rooks—institutionsand practices are social, after all—but neither do these things exist apartfrom all first-person commitment.47

On the other hand, this notion of commitment does not tell the wholestory, for it does not reflect the specifically discursive aspect that, for Hei-degger, belongs to taking over being-a-ground. To be responsible is to beanswerable (verantwortlich) (334/288), and to be answerable for something is tobe accountable for it, that is, to be prepared to give an account of oneself. Ad-umbrated here is a necessary connection between resoluteness—as the pos-sibilizing of factic grounds into normative reasons—and the practice of giv-ing reasons. To say that something becomes a reason for me is to say that itspeaks for something else, justifies it; and such a thing makes sense onlywithin the constitutive rules of a practice of giving reasons. Thus, whatever bethe particular project on which I resolve—whatever it is to which I commitontically—I always at the same time commit myself to accountability asgiving an account (ratio reddende). The practice of giving reasons has its ori-gin in the call of conscience; it is the “discourse” of an authentic responseto the call.

However, this claim appears to run afoul of the fact that Heidegger de-fines authentic discourse as “reticence,” not “giving reasons” (343/298). Onthe received view, authentic Dasein does not try to justify itself by giving an


account of what it is doing; rather, it goes silently about the world-historicalbusiness upon which it has resolved in its decisionistic way. Now it wouldbe possible to undermine the received view drawing solely upon Being andTime—reticence is compatible with the discursive project of giving an ac-count to oneself and, thereby, being prepared to account for oneself to oth-ers—but that would still leave a central question unanswered: if Heideggermeant us to understand that resoluteness entails the practice of giving rea-sons, why didn’t he say so? The answer is that he did say so, only not in Beingand Time. To establish a specific textual connection between authentic dis-course and the project of reason-giving we must return to the essay “Onthe Essence of Ground.”

“To what extent does there lie in transcendence the intrinsic possibilityof something like ground [Grund; reason] in general” (EG, 125)? Though“On the Essence of Ground” does not discuss conscience explicitly, in an-swering this question it suggests how resoluteness entails the practice of giv-ing reasons. Identifying transcendence with a notion of freedom that is on-tologically more original than that drawn from the concept of causality,Heidegger notes that prior to all comportment freedom is the condition forbeing gripped by the normative. Transcendence means that human beings“can be obligated to themselves, i.e., be free selves.”And this, in turn, makespossible “something binding, indeed obligation in general” (EG, 126). Hencefreedom—what Being and Time calls “taking over being-a-ground”—is the“origin of ground in general. Freedom is freedom for ground” (EG, 127).In unpacking what this latter claim means, Heidegger shows us where theproject of reason-giving arises.

There are three ways that “in grounding, freedom gives and takes ground”(EG, 127), and each of these ways corresponds to one aspect of the care struc-ture. First, there is grounding as “taking up a basis” (Bodennehmen) within be-ings, a kind of “belonging to beings” whereby Dasein is “thoroughly attunedby them” (EG, 128). This factic grounding corresponds to care as disposition.Second, there is grounding as “establishing” (Stiften), which “is nothing otherthan the projection of the ‘for-the-sake-of,’” that is, Dasein’s understanding.Formally conceived as taking over being-a-ground, understanding opens upthe space of reasons through orientation toward the normative, the agathon,seeing in light of what is “best.” Neither form of grounding is itself “a com-portment toward beings,” but together they “make intentionality possibletranscendentally in such a way that . . . they co-temporalize a third manner ofgrounding: grounding as the grounding of something [Begründen].” It is thisform of grounding, Heidegger insists, that “makes possible the manifestationof beings in themselves, the possibility of ontic truth” (EG, 129).

Now as we would expect, this third form of grounding belongs to dis-course as the remaining moment of the care structure. First, Heidegger tells

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us that the “originary” sense of Begründen means “making possible the why-question in general” (EG, 129). Thanks to the “excess of possibility” that isgiven in the “projection of world” (i.e., the excess, grounded in the for-the-sake-of as agathon, that constitutes world as a normative totality of signifi-cance and brings entities “more in being” by holding them to constitutivestandards), “the ‘why’ question springs forth” in relation to those beings“that press around us as we find ourselves” (EG, 130). If, in Being and Time,Heidegger defined authentic discourse as reticence—the silencing of theeveryday way things are talked about so that the call of conscience can beheard—he now makes plain that answering the call involves discourse as Be-gründen, answering for oneself and for things. In the face of the collapse ofthe one-self, Dasein confronts the question “Why this way and not other-wise?” (EG, 130), and thereby becomes accountable.

As Heidegger explains, the “ontological ground of beings” lies in our“understanding of being,” which provides “the most antecedent answer” tothe why-question (EG, 130). But an answer to the why-question is a reason.“Because such Begründen prevails transcendentally from the outset through-out all becoming-manifest of beings (ontic truth), all ontic discovery anddisclosing must account [ausweisen] for itself ” (EG, 130; my emphasis). To ac-count, in this sense, is to give reasons: “What occurs is the referral [An-führung] to a being that then makes itself known, for example, as ‘cause’ or asthe ‘motivational grounds’ (motive) for an already manifest nexus of be-ings”—a referral that is “demanded” by the “what-being and how-being ofthe relevant beings” (EG, 130).48 And only because there is such a demandcan Dasein “in its factical accounting and justifications, cast ‘reasons’ aside,suppress any demand for them, pervert them, cover them over” (EG, 131).Lest there be any doubt about the matter, Heidegger terms the transcenden-tal answering, which makes this ontic reason-giving possible,“legitimation”(Rechtgebung) (EG, 132). Conscience, then, calls one to take over being-a-ground, to answer for oneself, to legitimate by giving grounds, that is, rea-sons. Hence Heidegger concludes his essay by bringing these two elementsof conscience (hearing and answering) together in relation to the regret-tably undeveloped, but essential, reference to the one to whom reasons are fi-nally given and without whom the whole thing makes no sense:“And onlybeing able to listen into the distance”—that is, vernehmen as registering thecall—“awakens Dasein as a self to the answer of the other Dasein, withwhom it can surrender its I-ness”—that is, to whom it must account for it-self—“so as to attain an authentic self ” (EG, 135).

Needless to say, all this calls for more scrutiny. Even if the textual evidenceof a connection between conscience and reason is sufficiently persuasive, itwould still be necessary to examine more closely the connection betweenunderstanding (the for-the-sake-of as agathon, normativity) and conscience


both as hearing the call and as giving reasons. And it would be necessary toshow how these two moments of conscience remain decisive in Heidegger’slater writings, when he inquires into the two aspects of reason—reason asVernehmen, hearing, taking to heart, heißen, and nous, on the one hand; andreason as ratio reddende, account-giving, legitimation, and logos on the other.But it is already something to have shown that Being and Time retains an im-portant place for reason, that conscience underlies both our responsivenessto reasons and our practice of giving them.49

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according to Heidegger in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), the primarylocus of truth is not an assertion or judgment and its essence does not con-sist in the correctness of an assertion or judgment, that is, its correspondencewith an object. Heidegger argues that truth in the most original sense ofthe word is, instead, the disclosedness of being-here and, as such, the “onto-logical condition of the possibility” of the truth and falsity of assertions.1

The locution “condition of the possibility of . . . ,” recurring throughoutBeing and Time,2 suggests that this “original phenomenon of the truth” has astructural role akin to that of transcendental truth in Kant’s theoretical phi-losophy.This kinship is not surprising, since, as we now know from Heideg-ger’s lectures and other writings shortly before and after the composition ofthe final draft of Being and Time, his thinking at this time takes a decidedlyKantian turn, lamented by some, applauded by others.3

Yet one good turn deserves another, and in Contributions to Philosophy(From Enowning) (Beiträge zur Philosophie [Vom Ereignis] ) Heidegger tells usthat fundamental ontology was merely “transitional,” its transcendental path“provisional,” and its account of truth “insufficient.”4 Beginning in 1930,Heidegger turns from transcendental truth and the truth of being-here to“the truth of being” and “the truth that prevails,” a change in focus that per-sists for the better part of the next three decades. This change in focus,moreover, dominates Heidegger’s work during this period. In 1938 he him-self alerts his readers to nine different addresses and writings composed since1930 on the question of truth. Nor does this emphasis on the question oftruth fade from his writings and addresses in the years just before, during,

chapter

Transcendental Truth and theTruth That Prevails

Daniel O. Dahlstrom

5

and after the war.5 In the discussions of truth after 1930, being-here or Da-seincontinues, to be sure, to play a crucial role. However, it is no longer the cen-ter of gravity of the analysis. One important clue to this difference is theemphasis in Contributions to Philosophy that Da-sein, far from being some-thing that we can assume as the starting point of analysis and far frommeaning something like “human existence,” is something whose existencedepends very much on the future and, indeed, is the ground of a humanityyet to come (Beiträge, 300ff.).

There is a great deal more that would need to be said about these differ-ences, but the brief précis given here suffices to pose the first question that Iwould like to address: why does transcendental truth, the truth of Da-sein,the enabling disclosedness of what it means to be, as unpacked in Being andTime, come to seem insufficient, if not inadequate, to Heidegger? In orderto give even a semblance of an answer to this question, it will be necessaryto elaborate a bit more on the account of transcendental truth in Being andTime and, above all, to indicate why Heidegger takes his subsequent treat-ment of truth to be an advance over that account.

Though essentially posed as historical, this first question is connected tomatters of considerable consequence and controversy in regard to Heidegger’sthinking.These issues can be put into relief by considering two famous criti-cisms of Heidegger’s account of truth after 1930, the first by Ernst Tugendhat,the second by Heidegger himself. According to Tugendhat, the answer to ourfirst question lies in the glaring absence of any measure or criterion withinthe account of truth as disclosedness in Being and Time.6 Not that Tugendhatthinks that Heidegger’s subsequent attempt to identify the openness of thingsas the measure fares any better. In a justly celebrated critical review,Tugendhatinsists, as is well known, that Heidegger’s mature philosophy merely exacer-bates matters since there is nothing against which to measure the openness ofbeing, once the latter has been construed as the measure or source of themeasure itself.

In 1964, merely two months after Tugendhat first voiced his criticismpublicly (though others, e.g., Karl Jaspers and Karl Löwith, had been sayingmuch the same thing for years), Heidegger makes two substantial retractionsin connection with his account of truth.7 He calls “untenable” the claimthat truth underwent some essential transformation from unhiddenness tocorrectness among the Greeks, thereby recanting a thesis that he had ad-vanced repeatedly since 1930. Even more significant is his observation inthis same context that it was “inappropriate and misleading” to designate theclearing (aletheia, in the sense of unhiddenness) the “truth.”8 This second re-traction is staggering, when one considers how intensely Heidegger had be-labored variations on this very theme since 1930.

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Not surprisingly, some, such as Karl-Otto Apel, have interpreted Heideg-ger’s remarks in 1964 as an admission of the trenchancy of Tugendhat’s criti-cism. On Apel’s interpretation, Heidegger was effectively repudiating thetheme of the predisclosedness of being that had obsessed him throughout hiscareer. Apel goes so far as to claim that Heidegger is acknowledging that histalk of truth in an original sense was not so much a clearing as it was a clear-inghouse of meanings, only some of which prove to be true. As Apel readsit, Heidegger had long been guilty of a fundamental confusion of meaningwith truth and, in the twilight of his career, with Tugendhat’s exposure of hisfolly looming on the horizon, finally confesses to that confusion.9

One of my aims here is to suggest why such readings of Heidegger’s 1964remarks overreach. But while I think that Apel’s interpretation is wrong, Ithink that it is usefully wrong because it helps us become clearer aboutwhat Heidegger is up to and to reconsider critically its strengths and weak-nesses. Indeed, even if we give Heidegger’s self-critical remarks in 1964 agenerous reading, we are still left with the question of the sort of revisionsthey require.10 In other words, what are the implications of Heidegger’s sev-ering the sort of connection between truth and being he had been insistingon for over thirty years? And, given the admission of mistake in this regard,why did he make this mistake? What motivated him to make what must beconsidered an egregious error, even if one interprets his 1964 remarks gen-erously? I do not hope to answer all these questions in this setting but thesecond question that I would like to address in the following remarks isposed with a view to answering them: what is the significance of Heideg-ger’s 1964 concessions to critics of his account of truth after 1930? This sec-ond question is obviously related to the first since the account of truth after1930 is motivated, as Heidegger himself iterates, precisely by a sense of theshortcomings of the theory in Being and Time. Even if Tugendhat is wrong(as I think he is) about some of the details, he is right that Heidegger’s turnis largely motivated by dissatisfaction with the account of transcendentaltruth in Being and Time.

My chapter is divided into two parts, corresponding to the two questionsposed in my opening remarks.The first part outlines Heidegger’s criticisms ofthe transcendental account of truth in Being and Time and his elaboration, onthe basis of those criticisms, of a different way of speaking of truth, namely, asa “truth that prevails.” Following this review of the development of Heideg-ger’s mature conception of truth, I turn in the second part to the question ofthe import of the retractions mentioned above for this conception.

Transcendental Truth 65

1.The Turn in Heidegger’s Conception of Truth

Heidegger instructively criticizes the project of Being and Time by situating itwithin a taxonomy of kinds of transcendence. The birthplace of all the dif-ferent notions of transcendence is, he contends, Plato’s construal of entitiesin terms of the constant look that they present over many different andchanging circumstances. From this vantage point, the beingness of a being isthe idea or eidos that is common (koinon) or generic (gene). With the positingof this idea common to and yet beyond any particular beings, its separate-ness from beings is also instituted and this, Heidegger insists, is “the originof ‘transcendence’ in all its forms.”11 Against this Platonic backdrop, Heideg-ger proceeds to identify four subsequent senses of “transcendence”: ontic,ontological, epistemological, and fundamental-ontological.12

Ontic transcendence is, paradigmatically, that of the supreme being, thecreator who reigns above and over all other entities (though he adds thatGod is also confusedly deemed “the transcendence” himself—like “the mag-nificence”!—and even “being”).

Ontological transcendence refers to the sort of ascendancy over entities thatlies in beingness as the generality “over” and “prior to” all entities (and, hence,a priori with respect to them). Since Heidegger has some philosophical tradi-tion after Plato in mind, he is probably thinking of the scholastic doctrine oftranscendentals, those predicates that, because they range over all the cate-gories, cannot be defined in terms of them. Scotus’s definition of metaphysicsas the scientia transcendentalium comes to mind. At the outset of Being and TimeHeidegger himself hearkens back to this second sense of transcendence whenhe places “veritas transcendentalis” in apposition to “phenomenological truth”(Being and Time, 62/38).

Epistemological transcendence is the sort of transcendence that takes itsbearings from Descartes’ notion of the subject. The question of epistemo-logical transcendence is the question of whether that subject gets beyond or“transcends” itself and manages in some sense to reach an object (Beiträge,217ff., 355). This notion of transcendence, Heidegger adds, is overturned assoon as Da-sein forms the point of departure (Beiträge, 176, 217ff., 252). Butthe fact that epistemological transcendence is “from the outset surpassed” bythe standpoint of Da-sein indicates by no means that the standpoint of Be-ing and Time is not itself a transcendental one.

A fourth sense of “transcendence” is, as Heidegger himself puts it, thefundamental-ontological transcendence elaborated in Being and Time. Here, henotes, the term in its original sense as a climbing over or exceeding (Über-steigerung) is construed as a mark of being-here (Da-sein), in order to indi-cate that it always already stands in the open amid entities. But, Heideggercontends, strictly speaking the term transcendence is inapplicable, since being-


here as such is that opening (the opening of the concealment). Besides, headds, transcendence presupposes levels and is in danger of being miscon-strued as an action of an ego and subject. Accordingly, Heidegger concludesthat, in this context,“the notion of ‘transcendence’ in every sense must disap-pear” (Beiträge, 216ff., 322, 337).

Heidegger thus places Being and Time within the tradition of philosophiesof transcendence with the aim of elaborating what, in his eyes, is problem-atic about his early work.That problem is perhaps most visible in light of thework’s proximity to Kant’s transcendental philosophy, a proximity that Hei-degger takes pains to determine at several junctures in Contributions to Philos-ophy. To be sure, Heidegger protests with some annoyance against construalsof his transcendental project in Being and Time as an “existentiell” or “mod-ernized” Kantianism (Beiträge, 253). Whereas the notion of Da-sein suppos-edly overturns any sort of subjectivity, it is precisely subjectivity that Kantgrasps as “transcendental”; whereas the being, disclosed in and by Da-sein isnot to be identified with an object (only entities can be objects) or with aconcept of an object, Kant’s transcendental subjectivity relates singularly tothe objecthood of objects as the condition of their possibility (Beiträge, 250).Yet despite these considerable differences and others, Heidegger saw an op-portunity, as he puts it, to give his contemporaries a closer glimpse of the re-lation of being-here and being, by looking back to Kant’s project, especiallysince he viewed Kant as the only one since the Greeks to interpret beingnessin terms of time.13

Nevertheless, even though Heidegger’s retrospective on Kant took theform of a violent reading that broached a conception of the transcendentalproject allegedly more basic than anything in the critical philosophy, Hei-degger came to recognize that the effort to invoke a kinship with Kant wasdoomed. (As we now know, Heidegger burned the rest of the manuscriptof Being and Time, though, of course, this fact in itself says nothing about thefinished or unfinished state of those writings.) What doomed the effort wasprecisely what motivated it: the attempt to maintain the ontological differ-ence between being and beings. The aim of insisting on the ontological dif-ference was to pose the question of the truth of being in a way that sets itoff from all questions about this or that particular being. Yet as soon as thedistinction was made, it fell back onto the path from which it derives, wherebeingness is constrasted with beings, precisely as an idea, a universal (enstranscendens), or as the objecthood of objects of experience, the condition oftheir possibility. As a result, Heidegger continues, he tried to overturn his firstapproach to the question of being, undertaken in Being and Time and theKant book, by attempting in various ways to get some control over the onto-logical difference. As he puts it: “Thus, it became necessary to endeavor tofree oneself from the ‘condition of the possibility’ as a merely ‘mathematical’


regression and to grasp the truth of being in the basis of its own prevailing(the event)” (Beiträge, 250). Herein, too, Heidegger adds, lies the tortuous andambiguous character of the ontological difference. For, as necessary as thedistinction is to procure an initial perspective on the question of being, it isalso fatal since it stems from the question of the entity as such, that is, its be-ingness, a path, Heidegger is quick to point out, that never leads to the ques-tion of being as such. “Hence, it is a matter,” he concludes,“not of passingbeyond the entity ([not of] transcendence) but instead of moving beyond thisdifference and with it, moving beyond transcendence, and questioning fromthe outset from the standpoint of being and truth” (Beiträge, 250ff.).14

Being, as Heidegger understands it in Contributions to Philosophy, is ac-cordingly not supposed to be transcendent in any of the senses of the wordglossed earlier; that is, it is neither transcendent nor transcendental in Kant’ssense. Being is not something that is universally accessible or common; it isnot some cause or all-encompassing factor behind things; it is not the mostgeneral, albeit yet-to-be-conceived determination of entities with which weare otherwise quite familiar (Beiträge, 258ff.). Nor is it some universal prin-ciple projected by a transcendental subject by virtue of which objects mightbe known. Being is also not a projection by/of Dasein in terms of whichentities are uncovered and their manners of being disclosed (Beiträge, 251,256, 258). Far from being separate from entities, being is the historical eventof their presencing and absencing, an event that Heidegger also describes inthe 1930s as the conflict of world and earth, a conflict that prevails as thetimely spacing and spacious timing of entities (Beiträge, 260ff.). Its prevailingin just this way is what Heidegger deems “the truth of being” and “the truththat prevails.”

A great deal more, of course, needs to be said and many more questionsraised about this account. But we now perhaps have enough clues to beginto indicate why Heidegger finds his account of transcendental truth in Be-ing and Time inadequate. True to its name, the transcendental truth in Beingand Time passes beyond the entities to the respective conceptions of theirbeing, what Heidegger calls their respective beingness (Seiendheit), for exam-ple, their readiness-to-hand, present-at-handness, temporality, and so on, amove reflected in the distinctions between ontic and ontological and be-tween existentiell and existential that run throughout fundamental ontol-ogy. (Interestingly enough, this is precisely the aspect of fundamental ontol-ogy criticized by Derrida much later.) In addition, construing the disclosiveprojection of and by Da-sein as the condition of possibility renders its truthan action of Da-sein, initiated by Da-sein, regardless of the extent of itsthrownness, and thereby reinscribes the transcendental-phenomenologicalsubject.15 In spite of Heidegger’s best efforts, the question of being, as it isposed in Being and Time, falls into the traps that, in his view, victimized Plato


and Kant, namely, the confusion of being with an idea or concept of beingsin general, that is, in the final analysis, nothing else but Da-sein’s projection(understanding).

Nevertheless, being, as Heidegger construes it in Contributions to Philoso-phy, does echo one aspect of the traditional notion of transcendental truth.Being needs human beings and, indeed, needs them precisely in connectionwith its truth. To be sure, Heidegger is quick to advise that talk of a relationbetween being and being-here is misleading in this connection to the ex-tent that it suggests that being obtains of itself and that being-here happensto assume a stance toward it, like a subject to an object. Nevertheless, be-ing, Heidegger insists repeatedly, only prevails by appropriating being-here.“Being needs the human being so that it might prevail and it is only by be-longing to being that a human being achieves his consummate vocation asDa-sein.”16 The interplay of this needing and belonging constitutes whatHeidegger means when he speaks of the event (Ereignis) of being, and headds that this event is the very first thing that we have to consider (Beiträge,251). The truth of being, as opposed to transcendental truth, even the tran-scendental truth of Dasein’s disclosedness, is the event in which being pre-vails precisely by making being-here its own.

The difficulty of speaking about a “relation” in this connection betweenbeing and being-here has already been noted. While being-here is always away of being, it may or may not own up to this truth. Herein lies yet an-other connotation of the Er-eignen—the process of coming into its own andmaking being-here its own—by means of which Heidegger characterizes theevent (Er-eignis) of being, already signaled by the talk of authenticity and in-authenticity in Being and Time.Whereas in 1927 Heidegger puts the emphasison the authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) of resoluteness as the “most original, be-cause authentic truth of being-here,” in 1936 he is concerned to demonstratethat being-here is grounded in the truth of being as the event in which be-ing appropriates being-here as a clearing for its (being’s) self-concealment(Being and Time, 343–48/297–301; Beiträge, 298ff., 303). Not coincidentally,talk of authenticity and inauthenticity gives way to talk of simply being-hereor being-away (Beiträge, 301ff., 323ff.).

In keeping with this shift in focus from the truth of being-here to thetruth of being, Heidegger reconfigures the notion of a clearing. In Beingand Time “clearing” was a synonym for the “disclosedness” of/by Dasein, andHeidegger did not shy away from linking it to its etymology and to tradi-tional metaphors of light, even hearkening back to Descartes’ lumen naturale.The metaphor suggests that the truth of Dasein is that medium in and byvirtue of which things present themselves and thus are said to be. But thisimage, with its Platonic roots, suggests that being is the presence of thingsor even the paradigmatic, constant presence by virtue of which things are


present. Hence, when Heidegger turns to his account of the clearing as thetruth, not primarily of Dasein, but of being, he drops the association withlight in favor of the normal use of the term for a fortuitous opening in aforest. A clearing in the latter sense is a limited setting that shades off intothe darkness of the forest, but in the process makes it possible for things toshow themselves without showing itself in any comparable way. So, too, thetruth of being is the presencing and absencing of things, the event in whichand out of which and by which they make themselves present and ulti-mately absent themselves. But this event, encompassing the presencing noless than the absencing, is as such hidden. In Husserlian terms, it is unavail-able to any sensory intuition and only accessible by way of a categorial in-tuition, though it should be obvious that Heidegger himself must eschewany talk of intuition in this connection, given the implication that the pres-ence of something is required in order for it to be intuited.

Part of what Heidegger means by the truth of being can be appreciatedby considering the fact that entities do not wear their being (i.e., their event-fulness in his special sense of the term) on their sleeves like their color or sizeor relation to other things.This observation corresponds to Kant’s claim thatbeing is not a property or a “real” predicate.17 In analogous fashion, we knowthe difference between an open and a closed sentence, between a free and abounded variable; it makes all the difference in the world to say “Fx” and“( x)Fx” but that difference cannot be expressed by saying that “Existenceexists,” which makes about as much sense as quantifying over the quantifieritself. To say that there exists an x which is F is not simply to entertain thelogically possible state of affairs “x is F” but to affirm the presence of an en-tity with the property F. Stipulation of the distinction between open andclosed sentences is a recognition of this difference, even if that presence assuch is, according to the story that Heidegger wants to tell, typically passedover in favor of consideration of the entity itself and its properties and rela-tions to other entities. Perhaps the most notable symptom of this Westernforgottenness of being is the reduction of the significance of the statementthat something exists to a matter of belief (Hume), positing (Kant), or judg-ment (Frege).18 (Here we see the vestiges of the phenomenological reduc-tion even in Heidegger’s mature work).

But if the way in which the existential quantifier must be distinguishedfrom what is quantified, as well as from any property indicated by a predi-cate, corresponds in some sense to Heidegger’s distinction between an en-tity and its being, it only tells part of the story. For exclusive considerationof the being of an entity in these terms might still amount to identifyingbeing with the presence of this or that or even all entities. But being con-ceals itself not only as the presence, but also as the absence of an entity in

E


all the senses of its time-space horizon, that is, the different senses of its ab-sence before, during, and after its presence. In other words, the hiddennessof being is the hiddenness of not only the entity’s presence (shades of thescholastic distinction between essence and existence) but also its absence.

The truth of being is thus the clearing for its self-concealing in bothsenses of the term. Being conceals itself both as the presence of what is pre-sent and as its absence. But this clearing is not static; it is an event in whichbeing as such prevails. As Heidegger puts it:“Truth for us is not somethingthat is already in principle settled, that suspicious descendant of things validin themselves. But it is also not the mere opposite, the raucous flux andfleetingness of all opinions” (Beiträge, 331). He accordingly speaks equiva-lently of “the truth of being” and “the truth that prevails.”Those familiarwith Heidegger’s later works, particularly Contributions to Philosophy, haveprobably guessed by now what German word I am translating from when Ispeak of the truth that prevails. The term is Heidegger’s verbal use of wesen(sometimes translated aptly as “unfolding”). Heidegger reserves this verbaluse for being and, ostensibly because it belongs so essentially to being, fortruth. In other words, whereas beings or entities can be said to be but not toprevail, only being and truth can properly be said to prevail—“das Seiendeist, das Seyn ist nicht, sondern west” (Beiträge, 254, 255, 260, 286, 289, 342).Since Heidegger reserves this term wesen or “prevailing” for being and truth,it provides an important clue to his understanding of the truth of being.

This choice of terminology is also cause for confusion, since Heideggerat times invokes the term Wesen in its traditional significance as “essence,” incontrast to Wesung, where he is unambiguously signaling the sense of “pre-vailing.” More to the point, one might object that translating west as “pre-vails” is out of line in this connection, given Heidegger’s repudiation of ax-iology in any traditional sense and his antipathy to talk of values, let alonetruth values. But Heidegger’s rejection of value theory should not be con-fused with a disavowal of valuation. For he repeatedly alludes to the way inwhich being, in its appropriation of being-here, is the source of measuresand constraints. Or, as it might be put in more contemporary parlance, theevent of being is precisely what yields constraints in general, including nor-mative constraints. Herein, I submit, lies the basic reason why he speaks ofthe clearing as the truth of being and why I suggest that wesen might betranslated as “prevailing.”The historical event of being prevails precisely inthe sense that its valence underlies all bivalence, whereby its prevailing is notto be confused with the constancy of something ever on hand somehow orsomewhere, but the historical pre-valence of what is always already comingto us. Heidegger is, if not stubbornly taciturn or reticent, then at least dis-tressingly indirect, when it comes to elaborating what the pre-valence of


being means for beings and being-here. But he seems to have remained con-fident to the end that the human dilemma in the present, that is, nihilism, restsupon an obliviousness to being’s prevalence (the infamous Seinsvergessenheit).

2. Heidegger’s Retractions

These remarks bring us to the second question raised at the outset, namely,the question about the significance of Heidegger’s concessions, in 1964, thathe should not have used the term truth to characterize the clearing of be-ing. Here, too, Heidegger is perfectly unambiguous about the way in whichthe clearing gives rise to constraints. As he puts it: “Without the foregoingexperience of aletheia as the clearing, all talk of constraints and lack of con-straints [Verbindlichkeit und Unverbindlichkeit] remains groundless.”19 But,while echoing this constant refrain of his account of truth after 1930, Hei-degger now acknowledges that it was “inappropriate” and “misleading” toapply the label “truth” to it. But why exactly does he now find it “inappro-priate” and “misleading”? After all, more than once, beginning already in1927, he had inferred that what makes truth in the sense of discovery orcorrectness possible “must” be called “true” in an even more original, moreessential sense.20 The inference hardly seems valid, at least not without muchfurther ado, and Heidegger’s retractions in 1964 may well be an admission ofits invalidity, especially in light of his acknowledgment that “truth” had al-ways stood for a kind of agreement or correspondence (for example, alreadyin Homer, he concedes, aletheia signified homoiesis). In other words, Heideg-ger is acknowledging that correspondence and bivalence are necessary ele-ments of the original and rightly enduring conception of truth. In light ofthis canonical understanding of truth, it is inappropriate and misleading tospeak of two truths and, indeed, of a truth more original than truth as cor-rectness or correspondence.

But these concessions, it should be obvious, do not amount to a retrac-tion by Heidegger of his account of the clearing, that is, that event in whichbeing appropriates being-here to itself and constitutes the presencing andabsencing of beings. Nor does he budge on the basic insight that led him toinfer—erroneously, it would seem—that the clearing is the truth in a moreoriginal sense. For, as noted earlier, Heidegger continues to insist that theway in which being prevails in the clearing, appropriating being-here to it-self, grounds measures, constraints, and the lack of them, and thus histori-cally affords the possibility of truth in the sense of correspondence.21 Afteraffirming that the clearing, while not yet truth, grounds the truth, Heideg-ger asks rhetorically whether it is, therefore, something more or less than thetruth. Thus, while refraining from calling it truth in some more originalsense than truth as correctness or correspondence, he repeats the same basic


move that he has been making since Being and Time. Not truth as correct-ness or correspondence as such, but what underlies and secures it: that forHeidegger is what stands in question—what needs to be thought (die Sachedes Denkens)—at the end of philosophy, that is, the end of metaphysics.

A final word in this connection. In his 1964 remarks, Heidegger oftenomits the word possibility and simply observes that the clearing “affords” or“grants” (gewährt) truth as adaequatio or certitudo. This omission is probablyquite deliberate since Heidegger clearly does not understand the clearing asmerely one necessary condition among others. Whatever the merits ofApel’s reading on other grounds, it simply does not stand up as an accurateinterpretation of what Heidegger understood to be the import of his self-critical remarks in 1964. In other words, his retractions cannot be construedlegitimately as an acknowledgment that the clearing is merely a conditionof the possibility of truth, a clearinghouse, if you will, for meanings thatmay or may not prove true. Indeed, if it were not inappropriate to employthe metaphysical framework of necessary and sufficient conditions, onewould be tempted to construe the clearing as a sufficient condition, sinceHeidegger challenges thinking at the end of philosophy to take up the taskof asking why it is that the clearing appears only as correctness and reliabil-ity. Here again it is telling that Heidegger trots out a familiar argument. Theclearing appears only as correctness, Heidegger submits, because we think ofwhat the clearing affords and secures rather than what it is itself; and the factthat we do so is no accident since self-concealing, a sheltering self-conceal-ing, lies at the heart of the clearing. In sum, while Heidegger is plainly ad-mitting mistakes in his account of the scope of what “truth” designates, he isby no means prepared to jettison his account of being revealing and con-cealing itself as the historical event, the clearing that grounds truth as cor-rectness or correspondence.


1.The Death of God and the Claim to Truth

Are there eternal truths? Heidegger raises this question in Being and Timeonly to dismiss it. For what would it mean to claim such truths? Tradition-ally truth is located in our judgments or assertions. As Thomas’s much-citeddefinition has it,“Truth is the adequation of the thing and the understand-ing.”1 This is to say that there is no truth where there is no understanding.As Heidegger puts it in Being and Time: “Because the kind of Being that isessential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein’sbeing.”2 And is there Dasein other than human Dasein? Despite the effortsof those who search for intelligence somewhere “out there” in space, so farall such efforts have been disappointed. For all intents and purposes we hu-man beings appear to find ourselves alone here on this earth. To show thatthere are eternal truths, would we not have to show that the understanding,too, is eternal? As Heidegger might put it: would we not have to show thatthere always has been and will be Dasein? But can this be shown? The fablewith which Nietzsche, borrowing from Schopenhauer, begins “On Truthand Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” comes to mind, quite representative ofgloomy post-Copernican meditations on the immensity of the cosmos thatwould seem to make human existence no more than an insignificant cosmicaccident: “Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that uni-verse which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was astar upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arro-gant and mendacious minute of ‘world history’ but nevertheless, it was onlya minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and con-

chapter

The Descent of the ‘Logos’limits of transcendental reflection

Karsten Harries

6

gealed, and the clever beasts had to die.”3 Nietzsche here calls attention tothe disproportion between the human claim to truth and our peripheral lo-cation in the cosmos, to the ephemeral nature of our being. Will the timenot come, when there will no longer be human beings, when there will beno understanding and hence no truth? Thomas Aquinas, to be sure, wouldhave had no difficulty answering Nietzsche. His understanding of God leftno room for thoughts of a cosmos from which understanding would beabsent. But the author of Being and Time was too convinced that, for thephilosopher at least, God had died, to give such an answer. Absolute truthand the absolute subject are declared residues of Christian theology philoso-phy ought to leave behind:

The ideas of a “pure ‘I’” and of a “consciousness in general” are so far from includ-ing the a priori character of “actual” subjectivity that the ontological characters ofDasein’s facticity and its state of being are either passed over or not seen. Rejectionof a “consciousness in general” does not signify that the a priori is negated, anymore than the positing of an idealized subject guarantees that Dasein has an a prioricharacter grounded upon fact. Both the contention that there are “eternal truths”and the jumbling together of Dasein’s phenomenally grounded “ideality” with anidealized absolute subject, belong to those residues of Christian theology withinphilosophical problematics which have not as yet been radically extruded.4

This suggests that any appeal to an idealized subject in an attempt to groundtruth borrows illegitimately from the Christian understanding of God.Kant’s transcendental subject invites such a charge: is its constitutive powermore than an illicit projection of God’s creative power unto man? Becauseof Kant’s failure to subject his understanding of the transcendental subjectand, with it, of objectivity and truth to sufficiently critical attention, hisCopernican revolution remained incomplete. The charge is indeed obvious,and Herder already protested both Kant’s elision of the person and his eli-sion of language. Challenging Kant, Herder insists that we can think only inour own natural language. If those metaphysicians Kant criticizes have lostthemselves in airless realms, Kant himself, Herder suggests, tries to rise evenhigher, losing himself in an empty, merely formal transcendence. Instead ofa critique of pure reason, Herder therefore demands a physiology of man’sfaculties and a study of language as it is.

In Being and Time Heidegger offers a succinct argument in support ofwhat is essentially the same position: “Discourse (Rede) is existentially lan-guage (Sprache), because that entity whose disclosedness it Articulates accord-ing to significations, has, as its kind of Being, Being-in-the-world—a beingwhich has been thrown and submitted to the ‘world.’”5 This denies the tradi-tional distinction between a timeless Rede or logos and concrete language.Because human being is always bound into the world and that means alsointo a particular historical situation, language can never be pure or innocent.

The Descent of the ‘Logos’ 75

Essentially the same argument challenges the distinction between the tran-scendental subject and the person.

All this suggests that if we are more radically critical than Kant and freehis crucial insight from remnants of the Christian understanding of truth,which would ground truth in the creative and aperspectival vision of God,we will be forced to submerge both subject and logos in the world and sub-ject both to time. In different ways both Heidegger’s Being and Time andWittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations bear witness to such a submersion.

When Heidegger speaks in Being and Time of residues of Christian the-ology that have to be radically extruded from philosophy, he is also criticiz-ing himself. He had begun, as we know, as a Catholic theologian, and henever succeeded altogether in leaving his theological origins behind. Thisinability need not be seen as a philosophical failure, but can be understoodas bound up with a recognition of what philosophy can and cannot do. Iwould thus resist those interpretations that, invoking Heidegger’s supposedKehre (“turn”), draw a sharp distinction between the later mystical and post-metaphysical Heidegger to the earlier still transcendental and still metaphys-ical Heidegger.6 I would claim rather that from beginning to end we meetin Heidegger the admittedly shifting and evolving tension between what Iwant to call a theological and a philosophical strand. Thus we meet againand again, paging through the many volumes of his collected works, reflec-tions that make one think of words by “the great Görres,” as Heideggercalled him in a review of Friedrich Wilhelm Forster’s Autorität und Freiheit:“Dig more deeply and you will hit Catholic ground.”7 “Ground” should notbe understood here as meaning a firm foundation. Even as a theology stu-dent Heidegger did not find himself truly sheltered inside what he called“the tent of Catholic philosophy.”8 From the very beginning we sense ten-sion between Heidegger’s faith, his theological studies, and an emphasis onself and self-realization. To be sure, the sentence that in the review precedesthe cited Görres quote would seem to include the young Heidegger: “He,who never stepped on false paths and did not allow himself to be blindedby the deceitful light of the modern spirit, who in true, deep, and well-grounded self-denial dares walk through life in the shining light of truth,will find in this book a message of great joy; he will become conscious onceagain of the great good fortune of being in possession of the truth.”9 But didHeidegger at the time think himself in possession of the truth? The fact thatin this review he does not simply condemn “the much praised personalitycult” raises questions. He is, we should note, quick to add that this cult canflourish only when one’s “own spiritual freedom” remains in “the inmostcontact with the richest and deepest well-spring of religious-moral author-ity. This can, by its very nature, not dispense with a venerable, outer form.”10

Freedom, in other words, must be bound by authority. Here already we meet

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with a critique of that “negative freedom” that in the “Rectorial Address”was to turn into an attack on “academic freedom.”This critique is a presup-position of Heidegger’s receptivity to National Socialism and of his attackson democracy and liberalism, reaffirmed in the Spiegel interview.11

Kant knew too that freedom requires authority. But if autonomy is to bepreserved, such authority must be sought within one’s own self, where Kantwas thinking of practical reason. The young Heidegger, on the other hand,was thinking first of all of a personal faith. But although personal and pri-vate, this source of all moral-religious authority yet required an “externalform” to become communicable. Without such a form it would remainvoiceless, a pealing of silence, as Heidegger was later to say. But every formthat seeks to fix this wellspring threatens to turn what was authentic intosomething inauthentic and external. Does it help to insist that the formmust be venerable or ehrwürdig? That it is part of our inheritance? Heideggerwill repeat this suggestion in Being and Time. But our inheritance includes alltoo much that we cannot honor. Does responsible self-development not de-mand that we critically confront our inheritance? Where is such a confronta-tion to find its measure? In Being and Time Heidegger was to say:“Resolute-ness constitutes the loyalty of existence to its own Self. As resoluteness whichis ready for anxiety, this loyalty is at the same time a possible way of reveringthe sole authority which a free existing can have—of revering the repeatablepossibilities of existence.”12 “Repeatable possibilities of existence” here takesthe place of “religious-moral authority,” which cannot dispense with “a ven-erable, outer form.” But there are far too many such possibilities to offer anorientation. Faced with often competing possibilities, what justification canthere be for elevating one above the others? Dasein loses its way, where theexperience of thus having lost one’s way is also an experience of our freedom.

Of special interest among Heidegger’s early writings is the essay “Re-marks on the Philosophical Orientation for Academics” (“Zur philosophis-chen Orientierung für Akademiker”), which looks ahead to his later ideasconcerning how the university should be reformed, ideas that are hinted atin “What Is Metaphysics?” and developed in the “Rectorial Address.”“Phi-losophy,” we read in the early essay, “in truth a mirror of the eternal, to-day often reflects no more than subjective opinions, personal moods andwishes.”13 Such a turn to subject and person is said to lead to a disoriented“fluttering about,” to have made philosophical questioning a matter of taste.But such a degradation of philosophy into a kind of intellectual game, en-joyed by philosophical gourmets, is said to be unable to do justice to a “de-sire for final and definitive answers to the final questions of being,” questionsthat may suddenly seize us, seemingly arriving from nowhere, questions thatweigh on our “tortured soul, which know neither goal nor way.”14 Here it isprecisely the turn to a subject that refuses to accept an eternal measure that


is said to threaten a loss of our true self. Being and Time will turn this claimaround.

Reason, the young Heidegger is convinced, will show us the right path.Strict logical thinking will put us on firm ground. To be sure “a strict, icy-cold logic” will be resisted by the “delicately feeling modern soul,” whichrefuses to be bound by “the unmovable eternal barriers of the logical laws.”That requires a certain self-transcendence. “A certain amount of ethicalpower, the art of self-appropriation and self-surrender, is indispensable tostrict logical thinking, which has to hermetically seal itself off from everyaffective influence of the mind.”15 For the sake of what is eternally valid theself has to surrender itself in one sense in order to truly gain itself. Thinkingof the authority of pure practical reason, Kant could have said somethingsimilar.

In these remarks Heidegger’s thinking already circles around the self. Thetheology student thus wants the philosophical training of theologians toplace greater emphasis on what he calls a “justified egoism.”All other projectsand endeavors are to be subordinated to “the fundamental demand for theintellectual and ethical strengthening of one’s own personality and its contin-ued development.”16 Such development “cannot be allowed to take a backseat to an ever more intensive involvement with what is alien to the self.”17

Here already the opposition between Eigenentwicklung, development of one’sownmost self, and Fremdverwicklung, being caught up in what is alien, threat-ens to call into question the authority of the inherited faith, for first of allthat faith presents itself as something we cannot possess, relying on our rea-son, but as a gift that must possess us.18 The path of self-development has tocall into question this faith and “the treasures of truth” it mediated. Theyoung Heidegger knows how questionable his striving for these treasures is.“To be sure, this fundamental demand (Grundforderung) with its high innervalue includes also all the difficulty of its adequate fulfillment.”19

In this connection the young theologian acknowledges the importanceof lectures that would strengthen students in their faith.

About the pressing need for amore thorough apologetic education there is no doubt.A timely thought is being realized in these religious-scientific lectures. Sketched inbroad strokes, delivered in finely wrought language, the basic truths of Christianityin their eternal greatness present themselves to the soul of the Catholic student,arouse enthusiasm, remind him “what we have,” more precisely put, what the singleindividual has potentially. The actual possession of these treasures of truth demands,however, a ceaseless self-engagement beyond merely listening to lectures.20

This “justified egoism” remains central to Heidegger’s thinking and ispresupposed by what he later has to say about “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit).And already in these first publications “justified egoism” is opposed to false

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subjectivism—what Heidegger elsewhere calls “individualism,”21 or “unfet-tered autonomism.”22 Heidegger never lets go of this opposition. Whatchanges most fundamentally is his understanding of the binding logos. Herealready we meet with the conviction that genuine self-possession presup-poses the continued strengthening of the self.

How is such a strengthening to be thought?23 How are we to distinguishbetween justified and unjustified egoism? The juxtaposition of “strict, icy-cold logic” and the delicately feeling modern soul, fluttering about withouta clear sense of direction, gives us a pointer: the twenty-one-year-old Hei-degger seeks support in the eternal barriers of the fundamental laws oflogic. In his long essay “New Research on Logic” (“Neuere Forschungenüber Logik”), he enthusiastically endorses the progressive liberation of logicfrom psychologism, inaugurated by Kant, and to which the neo-Kantians,Husserl, and Frege had made such important contributions. The basic ques-tion of logic is said to be: what are the conditions that make any knowledgewhatsoever possible?24 Logic is transcendental. That is as true for the youngHeidegger as it is for the author of the Tractatus. And Heidegger’s focus, too,is here on mathematics and the sciences. Crucial is the distinction betweentemporal reality, with which the empirical sciences are concerned, and therealm of ideal, atemporal meaning, presupposed by all merely ontic inquiry.As the zoon logon echon, the animal rationale, the human being is able to raisehimself beyond that inevitably care- and perspective-bound individual weall are first of all and most of the time, thereby recognizing our kinship to arealm of timeless meaning. In logic Heidegger thus discovers, as DieterThomä notes, “a kind of theological stand-in.”25 “The universal validity ofthe laws of thought” grants us something like a foundation.26 Egoism is jus-tified only when it limits itself, binds itself to the eternal, generally accessi-ble, universally valid logos. Mental health and logic, logic and ethics belongtogether, as already Plato thought. Logic helps to make us more receptive tothe timeless treasures opened up by faith.

Fifteen years later Heidegger decisively divorces philosophy from theol-ogy—still in the name of self-affirmation and autonomy.Theology, he pointsout, has its foundation in faith. To be sure, it understands itself as a science.In the Marburg lecture “Phenomenology and Theology” (1927), Heideggereven calls theology a “positive science,” the latter defined as “the justifyingdisclosure of some present being that has in some manner disclosed itself.”27

What in this case is present is being Christian, die Christlichkeit, the essence ofthe relation, determined by Christ, of faith to the cross:

But faith also understands itself always only by faith. The believer does not know,and never knows, say on the basis of a theoretical experience, about his specific ex-istence; rather, he can only “believe” this possibility of existence as one that the Da-sein in question never has in its power, in which it has rather become servant,


brought before God, and thus reborn. The authentic existential sense of faith is ac-cordingly: faith = rebirth. And rebirth not in the sense of a momentary endowmentwith some quality, but rebirth as mode of the historical existing of the factically be-lieving Dasein in that history, which begins with the event of the Revelation; in thehistory that, according to the spirit of Revelation, has already been provided with adefinite, final end. The happening of Revelation, which comes down to faith, andwhich accordingly happens in faith itself, discloses itself only to faith. Luther says:“Faith is making oneself a prisoner in the things we do not see.”28

The will to believe is a will to allow oneself to be taken prisoner. Faith isbondage. But understood in this way, faith has to be, as Heidegger puts it,“the mortal enemy” of philosophy, at least if we understand with Heideg-ger “the free self-possession of the entire Dasein” as the “factically highlyvariable form of existence that belongs essentially to philosophy.”29 Philoso-phy and faith are opposed now as autonomy is opposed to heteronomy. Thephilosopher has to insist on what the young Heidegger called Eigenentwick-lung, has to refuse to let himself become a prisoner. But faith demands suchimprisonment. Does it not follow from this that every theological philoso-phy is, as Heidegger says of a Christian philosophy, a “wooden iron”?30

In Being and Time, as we saw, Heidegger’s commitment to Eigenentwick-lung turns against the high hopes he once had for transcendental inquiry. Hehad come to see the transcendental subject and the associated thought ofeternal truths that had once helped support his own embrace of logic as justsuch a wooden iron.

2.Truth and Self-Transcendence

But is this judgment justified? The transcendental subject is not dismissedquite that easily. What is at issue shows itself in Heidegger’s Davos disputa-tion with Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer seizes on the central point when he pointsout that having made truth relative to Dasein, Heidegger has to face thequestion: how then does such a finite being arrive at knowledge, reason,truth?31 “Does Heidegger,” Cassirer asks, “want to renounce all objectivity,this form of absoluteness that Kant insisted on in the realm of ethics, the-ory, and in the Critique of Judgment? Does he want to retreat entirely into thefinite being, or, if not, where does he see the opening to this sphere? I askthis because I really do not know.”32

This, it seems to me, remains the most fundamental question we can askHeidegger and his followers. Both, Heidegger and Cassirer, recognize whatwe can call the self-transcendence of human being, which is just anotherway of saying that both recognize the importance of freedom. Freedompresupposes that human beings, even as they find themselves inescapably insome particular time and place, are not imprisoned by a particular point of

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view, a particular perspective. Whatever limitation such placement may en-tail, it does not mean that imagination and thought do not allow us to tran-scend whatever would imprison us. “Thoughts are free,” as an old folk songhas it. Such freedom is constitutive of thinking and of truth.

Both agree that we do not comprehend freedom. Heidegger finds thequestion “How is freedom possible?” meaningless, meaningless because pre-supposed by all possibility.33 “From this,” he adds,“it does not follow that weare left, so to speak, with a problem of the irrational. However, becausefreedom is not an object of theoretical comprehension, but an object ofphilosophizing, this can only mean that freedom is and can only be in lib-eration. The only adequate relation to freedom is the self-liberation of free-dom in the human being.”34

Cassirer agrees with this formulation, and he also agrees that such self-liberation has its basis in our finitude. But this basis is not enough. The hu-man being must also possess what Cassirer calls “the metabasis that leadshim from the immediacy of his existence into the region of pure form. Andonly in this form does he possess his infinity.”35 That metabasis that demandsthe possession of infinity in form, Cassirer suggests, is inscribed into free-dom. That is to say, freedom has its measure in the fusion of infinity andform. To be sure, Kant already pointed out that the question “How is free-dom possible?” cannot be answered. We comprehend only that freedomcannot be comprehended. But, as Cassirer reminds us, Kant’s ethics allowsus to say rather more. Insofar as we are ethical beings, we transcend our-selves as merely finite beings of nature:“The categorical imperative must besuch that it is valid not only for human beings but for all rational beingswhatsoever. Here there is this strange transition. Our being limited to a def-inite sphere suddenly falls away. The moral leads beyond the world of ap-pearances. And is not this what is decisively metaphysical, that in this placethere is a breakthrough? What is at issue is a gate to the mundus intelligi-bilis.”36 And does such a gate not also open up whenever we claim truth foran assertion? Do we not lose the very meaning of truth when we make itrelative to a knower bound by a particular place and perspective? Is truthnot in its very essence transperspectival? Do we not measure ourselves, inthis case too, by what holds for all rational beings?

Heidegger no doubt would have insisted that when we speak that waywe misinterpret the self-transcendence of Dasein that he, too, recognizes—misinterpret it in a way that cannot hide its debt to the Christian tradition.In Being and Time that alleged debt is made explicit when Heidegger first in-troduces his understanding of the essential transcendence of Dasein. Brieflyhe touches here on the traditional understanding of man as zoon logon echonand as animal rationale. But more space is given to the transformation of thisunderstanding by “the anthropology of Christian theology.”To be sure, “in


modern times the Christian definition has been deprived of its theologicalcharacter. But the idea of ‘transcendence’—that man is he who reaches be-yond himself—is rooted in Christian dogmatics, which can hardly be said tohave made an ontological problem of man’s Being.”37 For illustrations Hei-degger turns to Calvin, who says that man has been given “reason, intelli-gence, prudence, judgment” not only so that he might govern his earthlylife,“but that by them he might ascend beyond, even unto God and to eter-nal felicity.”38 And Heidegger also refers to Zwingli, who understands manas the being who, created in the image of God, “looks up to God and hisWord” and “is drawn to God.”39 Cassirer’s understanding of man as the be-ing in whom the finite opens up to the infinite and absolute recognizes thesame verticality. In the Davos disputation Heidegger recognizes the need toacknowledge and to account for such self-transcendence. He points out thathis claim that truth is relative to Dasein should not be misunderstood onti-cally, as if he were claiming that each individual had his or her own truth.Heidegger grants the possibility of revealing what is as it is for everyone.He, too, attempts to show how the commitment to objectivity that charac-terizes science is possible. But, he insists, while the “trans-subjectivity oftruth” does mean that, so understood, truth calls on the inquirer to riseabove his concrete being-in-the-world, he yet remains caught up in what is,confronts what is, facing the possibility of shaping it.

What can be abstracted here as objective knowledge does indeed have a truth con-tent—this content does indeed say something about what is—but it also accordswith the existing individual who thus seeks truth.Yet the distinctive validity that isascribed to this truth content is ill-interpreted when one says: in opposition to thestream of experience there is something enduring, the eternal meaning and con-cept. I counter by asking: what does “eternal” here really mean? Is not this eternityonly enduringness in the sense of the aei of time? Is it not only possible on theground of an inner transcendence of time itself ?40

In the “Rectorial Address” Heidegger will locate the origin of science inthis power of self-transcendence, which always remains bound to humanbeings who can only exist at a particular time and place:

But if there should be science and it should be for us and through us, under whatconditions can it truly exist? Only if we place ourselves under the power of the be-ginning of our spiritual-historical existence.This beginning is the departure, the set-ting out, of Greek philosophy. Here, for the first time,Western man rises up, from abase in a popular culture [Volkstum] and by means of his language, against the total-ity of what is and questions and comprehends it as the being that it is. All science isphilosophy, whether it knows and wills it—or not. All science remains bound tothat beginning of philosophy.41

With much of this Cassirer could have agreed. But he would not have agreedwith the way Heidegger here substitutes a horizontal for the traditional ver-

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tical interpretation of the self-transcendence of Dasein. Time itself is nowsaid to be the condition that alone makes transcendence possible. Only thehorizon of present, future, and past constitutes our understanding of whatendures or is eternal.

Time is also the condition of transcendental arguments. Even as such ar-guments seek to inquire into what is presupposed by, say, all possible experi-ence, they can never make sure that the space of possibility has been ade-quately surveyed. For that space has no boundaries. It is thus always possi-ble that in the light of changed experiences the space of what is thoughtpossible will have to be expanded. In this sense transcendental argumentscannot lay an unshakable foundation. In principle they are always revisable,but this is not to say that they are therefore useless. Transcendental argu-ments help us to clarify our presuppositions. What they cannot do is pro-vide us with anything resembling an ought. They cannot tell us what to door think. For to the extent that they succeed, they have to be based on anunderstanding of what we now consider all possible experience, or all possi-ble thinking, or all possible speaking. But this means that we cannot helpbut experience, think, or speak in a way that accords with what such argu-ments establish. Arguments that look transcendental but appear to have anormative conclusion—consider, for example,Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—op-erate with a restricted understanding of what constitutes experience,thought, or language, which can then be opposed to the way we often ex-perience, think, or speak.

Just this question of the normative significance of transcendental reflec-tion is at issue in the Davos debate. The infinite, Cassirer insists, must be un-derstood not only negatively, in opposition to the finite, but as constitutedprecisely as the fulfillment of the finite as totality, where Cassirer remindshis listeners of the end of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and cites Goethe:“If you want to progress into the infinite, just explore the finite in all itsmany aspects.”42 Heidegger might have replied that Hegel’s absolute owestoo much to the old God, and that Cassirer’s finding it appropriate to citehim here shows that Cassirer’s attempt to bend together infinity and totalitystill betrays a borrowing from the theological tradition that transcendentalreflection cannot legitimate.

What separates the two philosophers is put into sharp focus by Heideg-ger’s questions:“To what extent does philosophy have the task to liberate usfrom anxiety? Does it not rather have the task to expose man to anxiety?”43

Cassirer answers with what he calls “a kind of confession.”44 He, too, takesthe task of philosophy to be the ever-progressing liberation of human be-ings. But such liberation Cassirer understands also as a liberation from theanxiety that is part of our earthly being. Such liberation is to compensate usfor a reality in which we can never quite feel at home, not, to be sure, by


offering us a metaphysical spirit realm but by turning to a realm that ourspirit has created.This is how Cassirer would have us understand the slightlytransformed Schiller quotation with which Hegel concludes his Phenome-nology: “aus dem Kelche dieses Geisterreiches/schäumt ihm seine Unend-lichkeit.”Anxiety is left behind as human beings raise themselves beyond theeveryday in which the spirit never can feel at home, and raises above it aGeisterreich, a spirit realm, which beckons us as our true home.

Cassirer here might have cited a passage from Kant’s discussion of thesublime in the Critique of Judgment: “But the mind listens to the voice ofreason within itself, which demands totality for all given magnitudes. . . .Reason makes us unavoidably think of the infinite (in common reason’sjudgment) as given in its entirety (in its totality).”45 And it is just this abilityto think an infinite whole which opens a window in the realm of nature tothe supersensible:“If the human mind is nonetheless to be able to even thinkthe given infinite without contradiction, it must have within itself a powerthat is supersensible, whose idea of a noumenon cannot be intuited but canyet be regarded as the substrate underlying what is mere appearance, namelyour intuition of the world.”46 The experience of the sublime opens a win-dow to the noumenal as our true home.

Key here is the fusion of infinity and totality, which is also the fusion offreedom and reason. Heidegger calls just this fusion into question. To besure, he too gives entirety, totality, unity a normative significance.We under-stand Dasein primordially only when we grasp it as a whole; and similarly,in the call of conscience Dasein is called to seize itself as a whole. But canDasein even be understood as a whole? Is such completeness not denied byHeidegger’s understanding of Dasein as essentially care? As long as it is, Da-sein is not at its end and in this sense is incomplete. Dasein comes to its endonly with death. But Heidegger would not have us understand the call ofthe whole as the call of death. “The ‘ending’ which we have in view whenwe speak of death, does not signify Dasein’s being-at-an-end, but a Being-to-wards-the-end of this entity. Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over assoon as it is.”47 In our very essence we are mortals, and only as such can wetruly affirm ourselves. Such affirmation presupposes an appropriation ofwhat Heidegger calls Dasein’s essential guilt, of the fact that, even while weare called to freedom, that is to say to take possession of ourselves, we haveto recognize that we have not chosen to be cast as mortals into a world thatall too often seems indifferent to our wishes and desires. “To project one-self upon this Being-guilty, which Dasein is as long as it is, belongs to the very meaning of resoluteness. The existentiell way of taking over this ‘guilt’in resoluteness, in its disclosure of Dasein, has become so transparent thatBeing-guilty is understood as something constant.”48 To think this constancy Ihave to think the self as constant.49 But what allows me to speak of myself,

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as I have been and will be, as my and thus as one and the same self? How isthe unity of the self to be thought? Heidegger rejects appeals to a soul sub-stance. And Kant, too, despite his rejection of all attempts to interpret theself as particular substance, is criticized for clinging to the ontological con-cept of the subject, which “characterizes not the Selfhood of the ‘I’ qua Self, butthe selfsameness and steadiness of something that is always present-at-hand.”50 Togive unity and constancy to our being-in-the-world, Heidegger appeals in-stead to death as the possibility that allows us to possess our life as a whole.As Heidegger himself reminds us, in Being and Time the appeal to deathplays a part that invites comparison with that allotted by Kant to the tran-scendental subject. But more important to me here than this similarity iswhat distinguishes the two. The unity provided by the transcendental sub-ject is said by Kant to be constitutive of all possible experience, that is to sayof all experience I am able to conceive, not just of all experience I mightpossibly have. I can thus think of a great many experiences that I could notpossibly have, for example, experiences someone had long before I was bornor experiences my grandchildren will have when I am no longer. In think-ing the transcendental subject the mortal self transcends its mortality, if onlyin thought, transcends indeed all facticity toward a boundless logical realm.It was precisely in such self-transcendence that Cassirer found somethinglike a spiritual home and an answer to Heideggerian anxiety. But Heideg-ger might ask what account Cassirer, or for that matter Kant, is able to giveof the fusion of totality and infinity that would alone justify talk of a home-coming? Does the very anxiety that is awakened when, thinking, I transcendthe limits of my Dasein, awaken anxiety and open up an abyss that swallowsall thoughts of homecoming? Does the invocation of totality not requiretranscendental justification? To appeal to the human power of self-transcen-dence to justify the possibility of the scientific pursuit of objective knowl-edge is one thing; to extend such justification to ethics and aesthetics in anattempt to make sense of a spiritual homecoming quite another.

3. Power and Poverty of Transcendental Reflection

To dramatize Heidegger’s question “Are there eternal truths?” I turned inthe very beginning of this chapter to Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies,”which has of course become a favorite text with postmodernists—one rea-son why I chose it. It contains the following passage, which has become al-most a sacred text:

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomor-phisms, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically in-tensified, transferred and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a peopleto be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are


illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained ofsensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered asmetal and no longer as coins.51

The passage is representative of what I have called a third Copernican revo-lution, which challenges Kant’s attempt to justify our claim to knowledgeby appealing to the human power of self-transcendence, pointing out howinextricably we remain mired in our natural and cultural situation. Whatseparates Kant, who would have us dwell contentedly on the island of truth,from Nietzsche, who again and again beckons us to venture into unchartedseas? Here Kant:

We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and care-fully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent and assigned toeverything in it its rightful place. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itselfwith unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by awide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank andmany a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, de-luding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him inenterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.52

Just what is the nature of Nietzsche’s disagreement? What does he mean bytruth? Accepting the traditional understanding of truth as adaequatio intellec-tus et rei, Nietzsche, too, points out that full adequacy would mean the dis-appearance of what distinguishes the two. In God’s creative understandingintellect and thing were thus thought to coincide. Following Kant andSchopenhauer rather than Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche understands “truth”as the correspondence of our thoughts to the things themselves. But “‘thething in itself ’ (which is precisely what the pure truth apart from any of itsconsequences would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible tothe creator of language and not in the least worth striving for.”53 Kant, nomore than Nietzsche, would claim that we can know truth in that sense. Hisunderstanding of truth is quite different. He understands truth in terms ofthe adequacy of the intellect, not to the things in themselves but to the ob-jects. These objects should not be confused with the things of everyday ex-perience. What we experience are only the subjective appearances of theobjects, constituted by our embodied understanding, inescapably situated ina particular here and now, bound by both nature and culture, as Nietzscheemphasized. But while the objects as such are never given in experience,they haunt all appearance and provide science with a regulative ideal. Tounderstand that something presents itself to us as it does only because ofour particular situation and point of view is to have already begun a jour-ney that aims at an ever more adequate understanding of the objects. Suchunderstanding let the Ionian philosophers ask long ago: what are things really

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made of ? Here we have the key to that beginning of philosophy to which,according to Heidegger, all science remains bound.

Would Nietzsche have disagreed with any of this? He himself points outhow difficult it is to take seriously what is urged by the third Copernicanrevolution:

Every person who is familiar with such considerations has no doubt felt a deep mis-trust of all idealism of this sort: just as often as he has quite clearly convinced him-self of the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and infallibility of the laws of nature.He concludes that so far as we can penetrate here—from the telescopic heights tothe microscopic depths—everything is secure, complete, infinite, regular, and with-out any gaps. Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and all thethings that are discovered will harmonize and not contradict each other.54

To be sure, Nietzsche does go on to remind us of the many ways in whichthe manifest image of the world is limited by all sorts of perspectives, shapedby all sorts of metaphors. But he concludes the first part of the essay bypointing out

that the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation beginsin us already presupposes these forms [the Kantian forms of pure intuition] and thusoccurs within them. The only way in which the possibility of subsequently con-structing a new conceptual edifice from metaphors can be explained is by the firmpersistence of these original forms. That is to say, this conceptual edifice is an imita-tion of temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of metaphors.55

This explains why the extent to which science trades metaphorical formathematical forms of description is a measure of its progress.

Borrowing from Schopenhauer, who in turn relies on Kant, Nietzschehere sketches with a few strokes his version of a transcendental justificationof the scientific pursuit of objective knowledge. The problem with the pur-suit of truth so understood, for Nietzsche, is not that it rests on shaky foun-dations but that it is all too successful, even as it threatens to render our life-world ever more uninhabitable. The pursuit of objective truth has to lead tonihilism. Essentially the same claim is made by Heidegger when he under-stands our age as the age of the world picture; and by Wittgenstein when inthe Tractatus he lays out the conditions that make meaningful speech possi-ble, where meaning is understood in its relation to objective truth. Wittgen-stein’s logical space is essentially the same space in which we must look forKant’s island of truth. But, as Wittgenstein makes clear, logical space has noroom for anything resembling values or persons. That is why human beingswill refuse to dwell contentedly on Kant’s enchanting island, why they will belured ever again to explore the stormy ocean that surrounds that island. Nietz-sche and Heidegger were such sailors. And must not the same be said, finally,of Kant? Did he too not recognize that his island knew neither persons nor


values. The understanding of experience presupposed by the first Critiquebinds it to objective truth in a way that has to lose sight of moral and aes-thetic experience. But, as Kant of course knew, we do experience personsand we do experience beauty. An adequate understanding of experience hasto do justice to both. It is his wrestling with such questions that presidesover the progress of Heidegger’s thought and helps to explain the transfor-mation of the transcendental into the oracular, mystical Heidegger. Our taskis to understand the necessity of thought that governs that transformation.

4. Of Gods and Angels

At issue here is the meaning of experience. What is experience? Do we dojustice to it when we use the relation between subject and object as a guid-ing thread? Heidegger recasts this question as follows:What is a thing? Is itto be understood as something present-at-hand? Being and Time calls this an-swer into question. The being “in itself ” (an sich) of things is there deter-mined as readiness-to-hand, inviting a pragmatic reading of Heidegger’sfundamental ontology. By putting the “in itself ” into quotation marks, helets us think of the Kantian thing-in-itself even as he invites us to questionhis appropriation of Kant’s terminology. It is indeed to suggest that readi-ness-to-hand is not to be understood subjectively, as merely a way of takingthem, als bloßer Auffassungscharakter.56 First of all and most of the time we en-counter things as ready-to-hand. But in a later marginal comment Heideg-ger expresses a reservation:“aber doch nur Begegnischarakter [but neverthe-less only a way of encountering them].”57 And already in Being and Time hepoints out that “only by reason of something present-at-hand ‘is there’ any-thing ready to hand?”—only to follow this with the question:“Does it fol-low, however, granting this thesis for the nonce, that readiness-to-hand isontologically founded upon presence-at-hand?”58 This rhetorical questiondemands a negative answer, but this does not mean that the being of thething is adequately understood as readiness-to-hand. In “The Origin of theWork of Art” (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”), Heidegger turns to thework of art to gain a deeper understanding of the being of the thing, a turnthat invites the question: how does this turn compare with Kant’s turn tothe aesthetic in the Critique of Judgment? That turn also would seem to rep-resent a deepening of Kant’s concept of experience, and invites the ques-tion: how is experience, thus expanded, possible? What is new in “The Ori-gin of the Work of Art” is Heidegger’s insistence that the being of equip-ment is understood properly only when we understand it as a belonging tothe earth, where the earth is understood by Heidegger as that which showsitself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained. “Earth thus shat-

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ters every attempt to penetrate into it. It causes every merely calculatingimportunity upon it to turn into a destruction. This destruction may heralditself under the appearance of mastery and of progress in the form of tech-nical-scientific objectification of nature, but this mastery remains an impo-tence of will. The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when it is per-ceived and preserved as that which is by nature undisclosable, that whichshrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up.”59

“Earth” here names what can be called “material transcendence.”What istranscended is every linguistic or conceptual space. Transcended also is whatHeidegger calls the “world,” which names a space of intelligibility in whichthings must take their place if they are to be disclosed and explained. Buteven if they are constituted by our language or concepts and as such are ap-pearances, the things that thus appear are not created by us but given. Insep-arable from our experience of the thingliness of things is a sense of this gift,a recognition of the fact that the rift between thing and word, betweenearth and world, cannot be closed or eliminated.

Continued reflection of what is presupposed by our experience of whatmakes a thing a thing pushes Heidegger still further, to a point where tran-scendental reflection invites a turn to what we may want to call the mysti-cal. In this connection Heidegger introduces the fourfold, the Geviert, thatis said to be copresent in the presencing of things. If the Geviert is indeedconstitutive of things, it would seem that transcendental reflection shouldopen up an easy path to it. What makes this path not so easy is the fact thatour own time, Heidegger insists, blocks adequate access to things. Heideg-ger is aware of the untimeliness of his speaking of the “united four,” ofearth and sky or heaven (Himmel can mean either), of the divine ones, dieGöttlichen, and mortals. Such talk may be understood as the nostalgic ac-companiment of his understanding of the modern age, shaped as it is by sci-ence and technology and thus by metaphysics, as the age of the world pic-ture or the Gestell, both terms meant to characterize the Verwahrlosung inquestion. That our age will stumble over Heidegger’s understanding of theGeviert and the associated understanding of the thing is only to be expected.

Three of the terms are easy to understand.

1. Earth names first of all the ground that supports us. But it alsonames what I have called “material transcendence,” the thinglinessof things that will always elude our conceptual nets.

2. Heidegger’s Himmel too is familiar. It means first of all the ever-changing sky above. But we should not forget that looking up tothe sky we experience ourselves as not bound by the here and now.The word spirit points to the possibility of such self-transcendence.


The word thus means not only the sky above, but the spiritual, ec-static dimension of our being, the space presupposed by every logi-cal or linguistic space.

3. The least problematic term is the fourth, die Sterblichen. As Being andTime had shown, our being is, in its very essence, that of mortals.

4. But what does Heidegger mean by die Göttlichen, the divine ones?How are we to think these? Heidegger here is thinking of Hölderlin,who speaks of gods, angels, the divine ones, and the Godhead.Especially important to Heidegger is his line “it is the Godheadwith which man measures himself.”60 To exist authentically, Hei-degger now seems to be saying, human beings must measurethemselves by something divine. But how does such a repetitionof the familiar understanding of the human being as imago Dei, towhich Heidegger himself referred in Being and Time, agree withthe concept of authenticity that he there developed? His argu-ment would seem to leave no room for something divine thatprovides human being with a measure.

Once again following Hölderlin, Heidegger speaks not only of the God-head, but of gods. Thus we read in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”:“Human Dasein is brought in a firm relation and placed on a ground whenthe gods are named primordially and the essence of things is allowed to speakso that only now things shine forth.”61 This claims that language is a necessarycondition of the presencing of things. But further it claims that language pre-supposes a primordial naming of the gods. How are we to understand this?

A successful naming of the essence of things presupposes that these mustalready have touched human beings in some fashion. To find the rightword, to take the proper measure, we have to experience how things belongtogether. Think of perceiving a family resemblance. We can perceive such aresemblance without being in possession of the concept that would explainit. To name a god is to find a word for the ground of such a belonging-to-gether of things. Hölderlin’s and Heidegger’s gods thus recall Plato’s ideas.According to Plato we remember these ideas. Baumgarten might have spo-ken of a clear but confused perception of perfection; Kant of an aestheticjudgment. Heidegger speaks a different language: the gods themselves haveto let us speak.62 That is to say, our logos has to respond to a transcendent logos.As Heidegger says of the call of conscience in Being and Time, the call of thislogos has to be a wordless call. Heidegger therefore calls “the divine ones” thebeckoning messengers of the godhead.63 Once again, following Hölderlin,Heidegger will also speak of angels. The poet hears and responds to theirmessage and make it public. Such ability to hear binds poetic imagination.But every attempt to thus name the gods and to make public what remains

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incomprehensible, in order to give human beings the measures they need tocome together as a community, does violence to what surpasses compre-hension. Again and again we will replace gods with golden calves.

What is such talk of gods and angels to us today? Would we philosophersnot have been better served had Heidegger listened more to Kant than toHölderlin? Are we not talking here about the productive imagination as theground of all our concepts, where the German Einbildungskraft points to thegathering together of some manifold that Heidegger connects with the wordlogos? As Kant recognized, we cannot look for the ground of such gatheringin either the subject or the object. It surpasses our understanding and it istherefore not surprising that we should grope for it with inadequate sym-bols.64 But what can be understood is that without this ground there can beno authentic Dasein.

As Heidegger makes clear in Being and Time, his talk of authenticity pre-supposes an ideal of human existing that can hardly be realized in our world.At bottom it is still the same ideal that the young Heidegger understood as“the free self-possession of the entire Dasein.” There was a time that thisideal let him understand philosophy as the mortal enemy of the faith inwhich all theology has its ground. But the more resolute the attempt atsuch “free self-possession,” the more inescapable the recognition that suchself-possession demands that freedom be bound by something like faith. Inhis “Dialogue with a Japanese,” Heidegger calls the relation between theword of scripture and theological-speculative thinking that occupied theyoung theology student the same relation that, then still concealed, was laterto occupy him as the relation between language and being.65 The statementis a bit surprising. Did Heidegger not say in the Introduction to Metaphysicsthat a world separated the Christian conception, which understood logos as abeing, from the understanding that we meet with in a thinker such as Hera-clitus, who understood being as logos and logos again as “primordial gather-ing?”66 In the Old Testament logos means the word in the sense of command-ment; the Ten Commandments were hoi deka logoi. “Logos thus means: thekeryx, angelos, the herald, the messenger who transmits orders and command-ments.”67 In his conversation with the Japanese Heidegger thus bridges thisonto-theological difference. And when he there says of his theological originthat origin also awaits us as a task, he invites philosophy to return to onto-theology. Our task is to make a transition from being understood as logos, asgathering, to some concrete being that we experience and that gathers us.

Still concealed, the relationship between the word of scripture and theo-logical-speculative thinking is said by Heidegger to be the same relationshipas that between language and being.68 In a different and yet similar way italso conceals the relationship between divine and human logos. Both beingand language Heidegger thinks again and again as logos, understood as “the


constant gathering” of beings.69 And when we read in Being and Time,“Dis-course is existentially language,” that is, beings, “because that entity whosedisclosedness it articulates according to significations, has, as its kind of Be-ing, Being-in-the-world—a Being which has been thrown and submitted tothe ‘world,’”70 the same argument can be used to support the following: thedivine Heraclitean logos must descend into the realm of beings; it has to be-come concrete and visible. The logos has to become flesh. Philosophy can-not comprehend such incarnation, nor can it force such a descent. But itcan show that such a descent is demanded by Heidegger’s concept of au-thenticity. Authenticity demands windows in the house that objectifyingreason has built, windows to transcendence. How is such transcendence ex-perienced? One such experience is the experience of the beautiful. Anotheris the experience of a person.

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1.The Problem

The official aim of Being and Time is to reawaken the question of the senseof being—the project Heidegger calls “fundamental ontology.” In that work,and others from the same period, he employs, as a new technical term, theexpression sein lassen,“to let be.”This is a compound transitive verb, the sub-ject of which (if made explicit at all) is generally Dasein or Dasein’s world,and the direct object of which is entities, or some species thereof. So, simpleuses of the term might be claims like “Dasein lets entities be” or “Theeveryday world lets equipment be.” Moreover, there are also a number ofbroadly related verbs, used in similar ways, such as: begegnen lassen, “to letshow up”; bewenden lassen, “to let have-a-role”; entlassen, “to release”; andeven freigeben, “to set-free.” Again, in all these cases, the active subject (ifmentioned at all) is typically Dasein or its world, and the passive objects areentities of some sort.

Various of these points are illustrated by a well-known paragraph fromsection 18 (worldishness) of Being and Time and a shorter one from section26 (others and Mitsein):

Ontically, to let-have-a-role means this: within some factical carefulness, to let some-thing available be thus and so, as it thenceforth is, and in order that it be so. We takethis ontical sense of “letting be” as fundamentally ontological. And that’s how weinterpret the sense of the antecedent setting-free of what is intraworldly availablefrom the outset. To let “be” antecedently does not mean to bring something firstinto its being and produce it, but rather to discover “entities” already in their avail-ability and, so, to let entities with this being show up.1

chapter

Letting Be

John Haugeland

7

And:

Dasein’s world sets free entities that are not only quite different from equipment andthings, but which, in accord with their sort-of-being as Dasein themselves, are “in”the world by way of being-in-the-world—the world in which they at the sametime show up as intraworldly. These entities are neither occurrent nor available, butrather are just like the very Dasein that sets them free—they are there too, co-there.2

The latter passage not only explicitly mentions Dasein’s world as the subjectof the verb, but also makes clear that its objects are not limited to availableequipment—since other people and occurrent things are likewise explicitlymentioned.

Now, the first substantitive point I want to make is that this is very weird.What could it mean to say that Dasein’s world “lets entities be” and “setsthem free”? Free from what? And what would happen if it stopped doingthat? Would all entities cease to be—or cease to be free? But Dasein’s worldis only insofar as Dasein is. Does that mean that if there were no Daseinthere would be no entities at all? To be sure, some of these questions may bemisguided; but, unless we confront them, we’ll never find out how or why.If we don’t acknowledge at the outset how odd and alien Heidegger’sclaims are, we have no hope of figuring out whatever it was he was tryingto say.

So I propose to take it very slowly, and see what sense we can make, stepby step—starting with a brief survey of how the verb phrase “let be” isused in English. It seems to me that, very roughly, we can distinguish fourbasic senses—which might be called the acquiescing, allowing, enabling, and ef-fecting senses—as follows:

Acquiescing:This is what we mean by “let it be,” when we advise some-one not to struggle with something—for instance, not to respond (toan insult), not to intervene (in a fight), or just not to keep trying (withsome hopeless effort). (The title of the Beatles’ song has this acquiesc-ing sense.)

Allowing:To let be can mean to permit—in the sense of not prevent-ing—as when the Robinsons let their children be a little rowdier onSaturday nights.

Enabling: Or it can mean to permit in another way, as making possi-ble—as when a new highway lets a city be approached from the south,or a dam lets the spring floodwaters be held for the summer crops.

Effecting: Finally, to let something be can be to bring it about or makeit so—as when God said, “Let there be light” (and there was light).But it’s the same sense, I think, when a geometer says, “Let C be the

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midpoint of line AB,” or the ball players say,“Let this sidewalk be thegoal line.”

Now, though Heidegger’s word—lassen—is cognate and mostly synony-mous with the English let, they are of course not fully equivalent in all con-texts. Even so, I suggest that distinguishing these four senses will be all the“dictionary work” we need. For fundamental ontology makes us push andtwist our vocabulary in any case; and English words are as malleable as any.

2. Letting Equipment Be

We can begin with the same special case that Heidegger himself does: every-day intraworldly equipment. It is in this context that he introduces theother two lassen-verbs mentioned above: bewenden lassen and begegnen lassen.But it’s not so hard to see how these work, so long as we’re careful aboutthe rest of the terminology too. In sections 15 and 18, respectively, Zuhan-denheit and Bewandtnis are both defined as the being of equipment. Butthey’re not the same. The difference between them is what Heidegger callsthe articulation of being into that-being and what-being (compare the actu-ality/essence distinction—of which more below).The that-being of an itemof equipment (what’s at stake in whether it is at all or not) is its Zuhanden-heit (what I call availability). Its what-being (what’s at stake in what “kind” ofthing it is) is its Bewandtnis—which I therefore translate as its (equipmental)role. So: availability is the equipmental analog of actuality; and roles are theanalog of essences.

Now, these various roles, to which equipmental entities are “assigned,”only make the sense they make in relation to one another (hammer/nail/wood, pen/ink/paper, and so on). Heidegger calls the relational character ofthose assignments “signifying,” and the totality of such signifyings “signifi-cance.”And that significance, in turn, is what makes up the structure of theworld—the world of everyday Dasein. But, with these points and terms inplace, it’s not so weird after all to say that Dasein’s world lets intraworldlyentities “have their roles” (bewenden lassen), or even that it lets them “showup” as anything whatsoever (begegnen lassen). For the world is defined, in ef-fect, as the totality of all those roles in their essential interrelations. Hence,without it, nothing could show up as—or, therefore, be—anything equip-mental at all. Or, to make the same point by means of a special case, whocould deny that the “world” of baseball lets certain discernible configura-tions be strikes, home runs, and the like?

The problem with this kind of case is not that it’s unpersuasive (as far asit goes) but that it’s too easy. It’s not big news that, without Dasein, nothingwould be a hammer or a home run. But what about entities that have been

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around since long before there was Dasein, and still will be long after—enti-ties that are (as we want to say) independent of Dasein? This question, how-ever, cannot even be addressed without some grasp of the relevant sense of“independence”; and that turns out to presuppose the concept of that-being.

3.That-Being and Production

The articulation of being into that-being and what-being is one of the fourbasic problems identified in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Die Grund-probleme der Phänomenologie). In the chapter of that work addressed to thisproblem—or, rather, the chapter devoted to the historical background pre-requisite to addressing the problem—Heidegger begins with the scholasticdistinction between essentia and existentia, and the problem of how theycould come together in an entity. In the case of finite entities (creatures),they are officially brought together in the causal act of divine creation: enti-ties are at all in that they are enacted or actualized by God. So, existentia =createdness = enactedness = actuality.

The trouble is: if you just say that this “bringing together” is an “actualiz-ing act” (of “causal creation”), you haven’t really said anything about whatthat amounts to, or therefore thrown any light on what “being actual” infact means. It is better, Heidegger suggests, to keep track of the originalsense of existentia itself, and then trace that sense back to its roots in Greekontology. Thus, the verb existere came to mean “to exist” from the moreoriginal meaning of ex-sistere: to cause to stand out, stand forth, or stand still.With that in mind, we can then ask the obvious question: why would a verbwith that original sense come to mean anything like “is actual” or “has that-being”? Prima facie, for instance, its inner semantic motives are quite differ-ent from those of the Kantian definition of existence as “absolute position.”

And here is where returning to the formative Greek sensibilities can shedsome real light. Briefly, the Kantian definition makes sense within whatHeidegger calls the horizon of perceptual comportment; that is, Kant’s un-derstanding of “empirical” entities as such takes its guidance from the per-spective of their being knowable, going back ultimately to intuition. Bycontrast, Heidegger suggests, the Greek understanding of that-being—inwhich the scholastic concept existentia is still rooted—makes sense withinthe horizon of productive comportment.

Though we care more about what Heidegger’s going to make of it thanhow he gets there, what he says is roughly the following. Greek ontology un-derstands morphe (the shape or form of a thing) as grounded on eidos (the“look” of the thing)—even though, conceptually (not to mention, perceptu-ally), the form is prior to the look.3 And this surprising ontological orderingcan only be explained if we see that the Greeks understood being not within

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the horizon of perception, but rather that of production. Thus, if we considerseeing a pot, then the pot itself must already have its form before the look ofit can be taken in by the viewer; so morphe is prior to eidos. But if we con-sider, instead, making a pot, then the potter must already have the look inmind, to guide him in giving the requisite form to the clay; hence, the re-sulting morphe itself is grounded in that prior eidos.

Morphe and eidos are both associated with what-being (ancestors of essen-tia). But what interests us is how this “reversing” of their respective priori-ties might affect the understanding of that-being (existentia). Within thehorizon of perception, the “object” is understood as already existing (actual);and so such existence itself can (only) be grasped as standing-over-against-ness (Gegenständlichkeit, objectivity), with no further insight into what thatamounts to. Within the horizon of production, on the other hand, the en-tity to be produced is precisely not understood as already existent—butrather merely what can be—and, more specifically, can, via this very produc-tion, come into being (become an entity) for the first time. Thus, existence—that-being—is somehow to be “conferred upon” or “accorded to” some-thing (determined by the eidos) that does not yet “have” it. And the idea isthat this “according of existence to”—“letting be”—can in turn be a clue tothat which is accorded by it (= that-being).

Return to the potter. What exactly does he do, that lets the pot be? Well,of course, he shapes it, dries it, colors it, fires it, and so on. But any or all ofthose could conclude with an angry smash and a pile of rubble—which isto say, neither produce a pot nor let it be at all. Genuine, successful produc-tion of a pot—that is, finishing it, and, in fact, letting it be—is something morelike letting go of or releasing it: that is, handing it over to the customer, orputting it in the cupboard, available to be used. And here the connotationsof allowing and acquiescing, mentioned earlier, begin to get a grip—as, in-deed, does “setting-free.”

Yet, even in the special context of craftwork, letting-go-of cannot alonesuffice as an account of what the producer does in “according” that-being tothe product. For if, as soon as the producer let go, the intended product hadcrumbled or vanished, it still would not have been produced. So productiveletting-be has to have the further character of setting the product out on itsown, to stand up and be (persist as) what it is—establishing it, so to speak. But,if what is involved in coming-to-be is being set out on its own and estab-lished in this way, then we can see how the phrase ex-sistere—to cause tostand out or stand forth—could be taken to express it.What’s more, we get atleast a glimmer of how independence (out-on-its-own-ness) could be notmerely compatible but conceptually connected with letting be.

But, finally, in order to establish and set the product up in that way, theproducer has to give it (arrange for it to have) the capacities and capabilities

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that it will need in order to be on its own. A pot, for instance, may need acertain strength, stability, and waterproofness; and so the potter must ensurethat it has them. In other words, in producing, the producer must enable theproduct to be whatever it is to be, and, in so doing, enable it to stand on itsown—which is to say, to be or ek-sist at all. And precisely within that en-abling lies the intelligibility of creation as actualization—the possible unionof essence and existence.

Therefore, at least within the horizon of production, the enabling senseof letting-be is ultimately the deepest.

4. Scientific Discovering

It is one thing to say that Dasein “lets” its own equipment “be,” that it “sets”the products of its own labor “free”; but it’s quite another to say any suchthing about protons, planets, or prehistoric lizards.Yet it’s perfectly clear thatHeidegger wants to make that claim too:“[Scientific projection = thematiz-ing] aims at a setting free of entities that show up intraworldly, in such a waythat they can ‘throw themselves against’ a pure discovering—that is, can be-come objects. Thematizing objectifies. It does not first ‘posit’ entities, butrather sets them free in such a way that they become ‘objectively’ question-able and determinable.”4 But—we have to ask again—what could it mean tosay that Dasein’s thematizing sets protons and planets free? What prison arethey in? How do we “let” them out? How can we enable them to “throwthemselves against” a pure discovering?

Now, what is perhaps the biggest surprise in this context is that thesequestions do have answers. If you will pardon my tweaking the metaphors amoment longer, we can answer this way: until Dasein releases them, entitiesremain in the darkest of all prisons, the prison of utter obscurity; we letthem out by bringing them to light (into the clearing); and we enable themto throw themselves against a pure discovery by erecting a pure discovery intheir path and accepting what happens as the result of their coming upagainst it. Or, less metaphorically, we introduce measuring instruments andaccept their “readings” as evidence.

The crucial insight is this: letting entities throw themselves against a purediscovery is not easy, nor even easily recognized when achieved.Thus, whenGalileo’s peripatetic opponents argued that the specks of light visible in histelescope were not moons of Jupiter but rather mere artifacts of the instru-ment itself, they were being neither entirely obstreperous nor obtuse—andGalileo knew it. As a point of comparison, suppose a colleague claimed thatfour invisible “Martians” accompany your every lecture—and produced thevideos to prove it (made with a special new camera, of course). Wouldn’tyou suspect that those “Martians” have more to do with that “special” cam-

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era than with your lectures? Likewise, Galileo’s contemporaries had all kindsof good reasons to doubt the ostensible “evidence” he was offering them.And therefore, most of the work he had to do was to show, step by step,question by question, that what appeared in the telescope really was some-thing “out there.”

And, what did it take to do that? Well, he made multiple telescopes andshowed that what you saw was the same, no matter which one you used.He showed and explained how they were constructed and why they wouldlet distant objects seem closer and larger. He invited people to look at dis-tant terrestrial objects—objects the existence and appearance of which theycould independently confirm. He showed that, not only did those specksstay with Jupiter as it moved against the fixed stars, but also that they them-selves visibly moved relative to Jupiter in just the way they would if theywere separate bodies orbiting around it. Only after all of this, and more be-sides, could people so much as see what was in some sense “right beforetheir eyes.”

It is this sort of work—often hard work—that Heidegger means by “let-ting entities show up” (begegnen lassen) and, more specifically, letting them“throw themselves against” (entgegnenwerfen) a pure discovery. Such “letting”is clearly more than mere allowing or acquiescing-in, but also and especiallyenabling. In fact, in the sense in which discovery (observation) is essentially anacquiescing-in—accepting of—whatever is discovered, acquiescing itself ispart of what is enabled.

Now, in German, the words themselves lubricate the transition frombegegnen lassen and entgegnenwerfen to Gegenstand and gegenständlich; but, philo-sophically, those moves still have to be paid for—in other words, explainedand justified. It’s one thing to say that Dasein enables entities to show up; butit’s quite another to say that it enables them to be—or, be objects—at all.Yetthe latter, I’m convinced, is the claim he is really trying to make—or, morecautiously, was setting himself up to make in Division Three.

5. Scientific Laws

It might seem that Heidegger explicitly repudiates the thesis I just attributedto him. For he says, in section 43:“If Dasein does not exist, then ‘indepen-dence’‘is’ not either, nor ‘is’ the ‘in-itself.’ . . . It can be said then, neither thatentities are nor that they are not. But now, so long as the understanding ofbeing is, and with it the understanding of occurrentness, it can perfectlywell be said that entities will still continue to be then.”5 And he adds in thenext section: “‘There is’ truth only so far and so long as Dasein is. Only then areentities discovered; and they are disclosed only so long as Dasein is at all.”6

And finally, on the following page: “That, prior to Newton, his laws were

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neither true nor false, cannot mean that the entities those laws discoveringlypoint out were not [there] prior to him. Through Newton, the laws becametrue; with them, the entities in themselves became accessible to Dasein; withthe discoveredness of these entities, they show themselves as precisely the en-tities that already were previously.”7 This all sounds straightforward enough:there are (past, present, and future) whatever entities there are, whether Daseinis then—to “let” them be—or not. What depends on Dasein, when it exists,is not what there is at that time, but only what can be said, pointed out, oraccessed then—hence, what can be true or false. So, for instance, the force ofgravity didn’t come into existence the day Newton discovered his law aboutit; rather, it just showed itself for the first time, but showed itself as an entitythat had been there all along and would also continue to be. What could bemore obvious?

All the same, it is a little odd to say that the law of gravity wasn’t true be-fore Newton discovered it, especially since one of the things he did with itwas retrodict various eclipses, comet sightings, and the like, back to antiq-uity. And, in the meantime, there remains the question of what to say aboutEinstein’s discovery that there is (was and will be) no force of gravity afterall—just curved space-time. Does this mean that, through Newton, his lawsbecame true, but only for a while? But that seems crazy: if Newton’s laws wereever true, then they always were and always will be; that’s the kind of lawsthey are—and the same goes for Einstein’s.

(It may be worth noting that this line of questioning about physical Beingand Time is not disconnected from the text Being and Time. In section 3,Heidegger motivates the entire project of fundamental ontology in terms ofits relevance to foundational crises in the sciences; and, though briefly, heexplicitly mentions physics and the theory of relativity as one example. Soit’s hard to believe he didn’t have that issue in the back of his mind whenmaking the claims we’re now considering about Newton.)

So, how does physics (Newtonian physics, say) let physical objects be—“stand on their own, over against us”? Well, everything said above aboutGalileo still applies; Newton had to do that kind of hard, justificatory worktoo. But, with Newton, a further and even more fundamental elementcomes clearly into view: those very laws about which Heidegger makessuch an odd claim. These laws, I will argue, are one version of a more gen-eral sort of factor that is essential in every understanding of being and everyway of letting entities be. The advantage of proceeding via scientific laws isthat the form of their contribution is especially clear.

In order to let entities be, Dasein must somehow discover them—which,in science, generally means to observe or measure them. But observationand measurement only make sense if there is, in principle, some way to dis-tinguish between correct and incorrect results. Now, some invalid results may

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be detected by flagging technical errors or equipmental failure. But the onlyfundamental way to establish that something must be wrong is to show thatsome plurality of results are not mutually compatible. And that, finally, pre-supposes antecedent constraints on what combinations would and wouldnot be possible—which is to say, laws.

Thus, Newton and his colleagues could have far better astronomical datathan could Galileo, not simply because of technical advances but rather andmainly because they had much better laws. Knowing, as they did, with fargreater accuracy, what had to be the case, they could calibrate and fine-tunetheir instruments and techniques in ways their predecessors could scarcelydream of.

Superficially, there might seem to be a problem here, with the credibilityof the theory depending on the empirical evidence for it, while the accu-racy of that evidence, in turn, is made possible by the theory. But—withouteven appealing to Heidegger’s fondness for circles—we can see that theworry is misplaced. For, no matter how the methods are fine-tuned in gen-eral, they do still have to produce particular results in practice, independentof any particular predictions; and that still leaves room for empirical failure.

The point can be put more generally this way. It is in some sense “easy”to concoct a rich and powerful descriptive vocabulary. It is in some sense“easy” to concoct precise, general methods for investigating the entities pu-tatively so describable. And it is in some sense “easy” to concoct strict lawsconstraining the results of those investigations. What is not at all easy is todo all three at once in such a way that, when those investigations are assidu-ously carried out, the actual results are consistently in accord with the laws.

Now, according to me, succeeding at that difficult but not impossiblethreefold task is the general form of discovering entities and letting thembe—at least in the special case of scientific investigations.The crucial role oflaws is to restrict what there can be by ruling out various conceivable combi-nations. Only by virtue of that restrictive function can subsumption of par-ticulars under laws render the actual intelligible—that is, explain why onething happened rather than another. And I take this to be the scientific ver-sion of what Heidegger means more generally when he allows that under-standing entities is projecting them onto their possibilities.

6. Scientific Change

If the preceding is the general form of scientific letting-be, and if the that-being of scientifically discovered entities is Gegenständlichkeit—being-an-objector objectivity—then the relevant sense of letting be is again the enabling sense.For the upshot of subsumption under laws is to enable entities to stand upagainst observations and measurements—that is, to defy and repudiate them.

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And the crucial prerequisite for this defiant repudiation is, as we have seen, thelaw-mandated impossibility of certain combinations of observed characteris-tics or measured magnitudes.

More particularly, we now see how, through Newton and his laws, theentities of Newtonian physics became accessible as the entities they alreadywere and would continue to be. What remains utterly opaque, however, iswhat could be meant by saying that, through Newton, his laws becametrue—not to mention the inevitable follow-up question of whether theybecame neither-true-nor-false again through Einstein. What’s worse, withthis opacity, the force of the seemingly clear “as they already were andwould continue to be” becomes pretty murky after all. What could Heideg-ger have been thinking?

I think Being and Time will support an extrapolation in terms of whichthis question might be answerable. (Whether the answer could ever be ac-ceptable is another issue.)

Remember first that there are different sorts of time in Being and Time, in-cluding originary time, world time, and vulgar time. Originary time is notsequential at all. Simplifying ruthlessly, I understand it as the temporal char-acter of a commitment to an understanding of being. When Heidegger saysthat, through Newton, his laws became true, he is referring to the undertak-ing of such a commitment.Thus, it is ultimately that undertaking which letsthe Newtonian entities be.These entities are, of course, in time—and also inspace. But this time does not at all have the character of a commitment (noreven the significance and datability of Dasein’s everyday world). Rather, ithas only the mathematical character of so-called Newtonian space-time. Andit is in this time that those entities show themselves as precisely the entitiesthat already were previously, and, moreover, will continue to be.

Now, when Einstein comes along, he has a different commitment to adifferent understanding of physical being, which, in turn, likewise lets enti-ties be. These entities also show up as ones that already were previously andwill continue to be—though, of course, in relativistic space-time. It is a diffi-cult and vexing problem to say just what the relationship is between the re-spective sets of entities, but simple identity seems ruled out.

The easiest (and therefore most tempting) line is to say that, really, onlyone set of laws has ever been true, and only one set of entities—the entitiesthat those laws let be—is actual, in some timeless sense of “is actual.”Thus,what Einstein showed us is that, contrary to what we thought, Newton’slaws were never true and the Newtonian universe of entities was never actual.Rather, it has always only ever been Einsteinian.

One problem with this interpretation is that it’s incompatible with whatHeidegger explicitly says. Another problem is that it’s unlikely to be a stableposition. For, by the same reasoning, we would have to say, even now, that it’s

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really always only ever been an X-ian universe, where X is Einstein’s succes-sor—or, rather, the ultimate end of the line in that successorship, assumingthere “is” such an end and science lasts long enough to get there.

Why would that idea ever strike anyone as the easiest and most temptingthing to say? I suspect that it is more of the legacy of scholasticism. Theoriginal and final science—the only one that’s ever really been right—isGod’s science: the scientia of omniscience. This scientia is supposed to be ab-solutely and eternally correct, literally by fiat—the effecting sense of “lettingbe.” No one who has ever tried to think about it could imagine that “get-ting over” this legacy is or will be easy. It will require at least a profoundreconception of reality as such—which is to say a new and deeper under-standing of being.

What I have tried to show is that the idea of letting be, taken not as effec-tive and divine but as enabling and human, is an integral part of that largerendeavor.

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in his book The Genesis of Being and Time,Theodor Kisiel introduces hisanalysis of what he calls “the Kantian draft of Being and Time” with the fol-lowing remark:“When was Heidegger not a Kantian? It is almost like asking,‘When was Heidegger not a German?’”1 There are many senses in whichKisiel’s observation is indisputably correct and which ensure the fruitfulnessof an in-depth investigation of the relationship between Heidegger and tran-scendental philosophy. From a historical point of view, perhaps the fact thatbest supports Kisiel’s remark is the one he points to immediately thereafter,namely, the neo-Kantianism that pervaded the air of the German universityin Heidegger’s formative years and, in particular, Heidegger’s allegiance tothe “Southwest German school of neo-Kantianism” as a student of Rickert.However, in what follows I would like to focus on the relationship betweenHeidegger and transcendental philosophy more from a systematic than froma historical-genealogical point of view.

Needless to say, any attempt to explain the sense in which Heidegger wasa Kantian necessarily involves explaining the sense in which he was not. Forit is surely beyond question that he was not an orthodox Kantian. Heideggermakes explicit his own view of the tension between his thought and Kant’sin his lectures of the winter semester of 1927–28, entitled PhenomenologicalInterpretations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Phänomenologische Interpretationvon Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft).There he characterizes the importance ofKant’s philosophy for the very enterprise of Being and Time in the followingterms:“If we radicalize the Kantian problem of ontological knowledge in thesense that we do not limit this problem to the ontological foundation of thepositive sciences and if we do not take this problem as a problem of judgmentbut as the radical and fundamental question concerning the possibility of

chapter

Heidegger and the Synthetic A Priori

Cristina Lafont

8

understanding being in general, then we shall arrive at the philosophically fun-damental problematic of Being and Time.”2 Thus, Being and Time’s radicaliza-tion of transcendental philosophy has as its target the scope of the problem ofontological knowledge rather than the Kantian model for understanding it. AsI will try to show in what follows, Heidegger sees indeed his own project as Kantian to the extent that it incorporates the core of Kant’s Copernicanrevolution into the most important categorical distinction of his philosophy,namely, the ontological difference. On the other hand, though, as a consequenceof his interpretation of the ontological difference Kant’s transcendental ideal-ism is transformed into a hermeneutic idealism. Accordingly, Heidegger’sradicalization of transcendental philosophy aims to show, among otherthings, that what Kant erroneously thought were the invariant features of anyhuman experience whatsoever (i.e., the pure forms of intuition and the cate-gories) are just a special case of what is in fact a much broader phenomenon,namely, the necessarily circular (i.e., temporal) structure of all human under-standing.3 In this sense, Heidegger welcomes Kant’s discovery of the syn-thetic a priori that is at the core of his Copernican revolution, but he thinksthat the special function and status of the synthetic a priori is not an issuethat concerns some specific judgments (at the basis of the positive sciences)but one that concerns understanding being in general. Seen in this light, ananalysis of Heidegger’s hermeneutic transformation of the synthetic a prioriseems crucial to determining the precise nature of Heidegger’s Kantianism.4

Earlier in the above-mentioned lectures Heidegger explains the connec-tion between Kant’s discovery of the synthetic a priori and the so-calledCopernican revolution. His explanation is very helpful in this context, for it shows the exact way in which Kant’s transcendental idealism gets trans-formed into Heidegger’s hermeneutic idealism via the ontological difference.Commenting on the problem of the synthetic a priori Heidegger remarks:

Briefly the problem is the following: How can understanding open up real princi-ples about the possibility of things, i.e., how can the subject have in advance an un-derstanding of the ontological constitution of the being of a being? Kant sees thiscorrelation, one which we formulate in a more basic and radical manner by saying:Beings are in no way accessible without an antecedent understanding of being. This is to saythat beings, which encounter us, must already be understood in advance in their on-tological constitution. This understanding of the being of beings, this syntheticknowledge a priori, is crucial for every experience of beings.This is the only possiblemeaning of Kant’s thesis, which is frequently misunderstood and which is called hisCopernican revolution.5

Heidegger’s claim that there can be no access to entities without a priorunderstanding of their being is thus the core of his hermeneutic transfor-mation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Paraphrasing Kant’s highest prin-ciple of synthetic judgments,6 Heidegger’s claim would read as follows: the

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conditions of possibility of understanding the being of entities are at thesame time the conditions of possibility of the being of those entities. Hei-degger makes this idealist view explicit right at the beginning of Being andTime, when he equates what we could call the “hermeneutic” with the “re-alist” meanings of “being.”According to his explanation of the meaning of“being,”“that which determines entities as entities” is “that on the basis ofwhich entities are always already understood.”7 Whereas from a realist per-spective it is assumed that what determines entities as entities is somethingthat belongs to those entities themselves, that is, some ontic structure orproperties that those entities have and others do not, the idealist perspectivethat Heidegger favors assumes that “there is being only in an understandingof being,” and thus that “being can never be explained by entities but is al-ready that which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity.”8 In Heidegger’s viewthis idealism follows from recognizing the ontological difference itself, thatis, the fact that “the being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity.”9

As Heidegger explains in his discussion of realism and idealism in section43 of Being and Time, recognition of the ontological difference involves atleast two separate claims. On the one hand, realizing that being cannot be re-duced to entities implies realizing (against any naïve realism) that what deter-mines entities as entities is our understanding of being, and not somethingontically present in those entities and thus independent of our understand-ing of them. This is the idealist content of Heidegger’s interpretation of theontological difference that he expresses with the claim that the being of enti-ties must be projected in order for these entities to be accessible to us. On theother hand, realizing that entities cannot be reduced to being implies realizing(against any absolute idealism) that entities cannot be reduced to our under-standing of them. Parallel with Kant’s attempt to reconcile a transcendentalidealism with an empirical realism, one could say that Heidegger aims to bean ontic realist and an ontological idealist. On the one hand, this view isopposed to what Kant called “transcendental realism” and these days is usu-ally called “metaphysical realism”: the world is not made out of self-identi-fying entities; we are the ones who divide the world into different entitiesaccording to our interpretation of their being. On the other hand, this viewis not supposed to lead to anything like what Kant called “empirical ideal-ism” à la Berkeley, that is, it does not question the existence of entities in-dependent of us. As Heidegger would put it, that there are entities has noth-ing to do with us, but what they are depends on our prior projection oftheir being.10 Regardless of whether Heidegger’s attempt to combine real-ism and idealism is in the end defensible or not,11 what matters in our con-text are the implications of his hermeneutic idealism for an understandingof our experience (that is, of the conditions of possibility of our access toentities).12

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According to this view, our understanding of the being of entities is syn-thetic a priori in the specifically Kantian sense that it is, as Heidegger puts it,“prior to all ontic experience, but precisely for it.”13 That is, our understand-ing of the being of entities is not taken from experience (1), but at the sametime it determines all experience (of those entities) (2). However, this cannotbe so for Kantian reasons. According to Kant, the apriority of this specialkind of knowledge is due to the (alleged) fact that no human experiencewould be possible without said knowledge and thus is due to its universal va-lidity. But according to Heidegger a factual Dasein’s understanding of beingis itself “essentially factical” and changes historically by virtue of our contin-gent projections. Thus, we need to know what other sorts of reasons Hei-degger has to offer to justify the a priori status of our understanding of thebeing of entities.

The answer to this question lies at the core of Heidegger’s transforma-tion of the Kantian notion of apriority into the hermeneutic notion of theperfect tense a priori (i.e., the “always already”). This notion is supposed toboth preserve and transform the Kantian notion of apriority in the follow-ing way. On the one hand, as Heidegger is keen to insist, the priority im-plicit in this notion does not merely have the temporal sense of indicatingsomething ontically past but, as its name suggests, it also has the normativesense of conferring to that which is in each case prior the status of an ab-solute authority over us that a priori knowledge is supposed to have.14 On theother hand, though, the fact that it includes the temporal sense expressed bythe “in each case” is what is specifically incompatible with the traditional,Kantian notion of apriority, for it eliminates the implication of universalvalidity from the absolute authority of the a priori. In light of its historicalalterability, that something is “a priori” no longer means that it is “univer-sally valid,” but at most that it is “unquestionable from within” (i.e., by thosewho share it). From this point of view, the crucial challenge to transcenden-tal philosophy in Being and Time is to be found in Heidegger’s claim thatDasein’s “disclosedness is essentially factical.”15

In light of this claim, though, one may well wonder whether Heidegger’saim is really to transform the notion of apriority or rather to simply reject italtogether. For the claim that our disclosedness is essentially factical seems toimply precisely that nothing in it has the kind of normative status that a pri-ori knowledge is supposed to have. However, that this is not the intended in-terpretation becomes entirely clear when Heidegger claims that Dasein’s dis-closedness is “truth in the most primordial sense.”16 Thus, the crucial issue be-hind Heidegger’s hermeneutic notion of apriority seems to lie in whether itcan succeed in making these two characterizations of our disclosedness (as“essentially factical, but true”) compatible.This brings us back to our formerquestion. Given that our disclosedness is merely the result of a historical,


contingent process of cultural interpretation, we need to know what reasonsHeidegger can offer to ascribe to our understanding of the being of entitiesthe Kantian features of synthetic a priori knowledge.

The first part of the claim—namely, that the understanding of being isnot taken from experience—is just the expression of Heidegger’s idealism, as al-ready discussed. Being must be projected in advance in order for entities tobe accessible as such entities.17 This is such a basic presupposition withinHeidegger’s philosophy that he seems never to have felt the need to offer anelaborated justification for it. There is indeed a hermeneutic reason thatHeidegger alludes to repeatedly, although he never discusses it in detail. Per-haps the best way to express it would be with the help of Quine’s maxim“no entity without identity.”18 In our context, the idea behind it could bemade explicit through the following argumentative lines: given that entitiesare not self-identifying, one has to identify which entities one is talkingabout in order to be able to distinguish them from others. And one cannotdo so unless one has an understanding of what distinguishes these entitiesfrom others, that is, an understanding that provides the resources to identifyentities as what they are, that is, in their being. Heidegger suggests such a lineof argument in multiple places. For example, at the beginning of his lec-tures of the winter semester of 1931–32, entitled The Essence of Truth (VomWesen der Wahrheit), he explains:

We wish to consider the essence of truth. “Truth”: what is that? The answer to thequestion “what is that?” brings us to the “essence” of a thing. “Table”: what is that?“Mountain,”“ocean,”“plant”; in each case the question “what is that?” asks about the“essence” of these things. We ask—and yet we already know them! Indeed, must wenot already know them, in order afterward to ask, and even to give an answer, aboutwhat they are? . . . Clearly, we must necessarily already know the essence. For how oth-erwise could we know what we should provide when we are requested to nametruths? . . .We must already know what and how the thing is about which we speak.19

Thus, that an understanding of the being of entities must be prior to anyexperience of those entities is just a consequence of a hermeneutic con-straint, namely, that the way in which entities are understood must deter-mine in advance which entities we are referring to or, in general terms, thatmeaning must determine reference. This hermeneutic constraint explains whyunderstanding is necessarily projective. It also provides a more or less trivialjustification for the second part of the claim, namely, that the understandingof the being of entities determines all experience of those entities. Given thatthe prior understanding of the being of entities is what makes our experi-ence an experience of some specific entities (rather than others), it deter-mines what these entities are (for us),20 that is, it determines what they areaccessible to us as.21 Thus, that our experience is determined by a priori

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structures is not a consequence of its being constituted by some invariant setof conditions to be discovered once and for all, as Kant thought. It is actuallya consequence of the circle of understanding, that is, of the fact that “everyinterpretation . . . must already have understood what is to be interpreted.”22 Itis for this hermeneutic reason that entities can only be discovered by the priorprojection of their being.23 As Heidegger explains in Basic Problems of Phenom-enology:“An entity can be uncovered, whether by way of perception or someother mode of access, only if the being of this entity is already disclosed—only if I already understand it. Only then can I ask whether it is real or notand embark on some procedure to establish the reality of the entity.”24

Although the priority of an understanding of being over and above anyexperience of entities is, according to Heidegger, a general feature of all hu-man understanding, the paradigm example that Heidegger favors in order toshow the plausibility of this hermeneutic idealism is scientific knowledge.For scientific theories, as opposed to most ordinary understanding, are ex-plicit and highly articulated kinds of interpretation, which for this reason al-low for closer scrutiny as to their origin, structure, relationship to experi-ence, and so on. Still, as a kind of interpretation they are subject to the samecircular (and thus projective) conditions of understanding. In his lectures ofthe winter semester of 1928–29, entitled Introduction to Philosophy (Einleitungin die Philosophie) Heidegger explains:

A determinate scientific investigation moves within a determinate problem, a deter-minate question posed to that which is its theme. Thematization presupposes thegivenness of an object. But an object can only be given to me in the act of objecti-vation. I can only objectify something if this something is already manifest to me inadvance. A manifest entity as entity can only be manifest, if this entity in its being isalready understood in advance with regard to its being, that is, if it is projected.Thus, we see a completely determinate sequence within the structure of science.The central phenomenon is this projection of the constitution of being.25

In What Is a Thing? (Die Frage nach den Ding?) Heidegger offers a verydetailed explanation of the structure and characteristics of such a projectionwith the help of an analysis of the transformation of science from the an-cient conception of nature into modern natural science. He interprets thistransformation as a change of “metaphysical projection” or, as it is calledthese days, a paradigm shift. Heidegger makes clear that the core of this par-adigm shift does not consist in the emphasis on observation or experimen-tation, but on the projection of an entirely different understanding of thebeing of entities, a new world-disclosure brought about through the estab-lishment and definition of new basic concepts by modern scientists such asGalileo and Newton.26 According to Heidegger, to the extent that thesenew concepts organize all possible experience in advance, the grounding


postulates or axioms of these modern theories through which these con-cepts are defined have the status of synthetic a priori knowledge.27 For onlyon the basis of such postulates and axioms is something like empiricalknowledge possible at all. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Kant unddas Problem der Metaphysik) Heidegger explains this view as the correct in-sight behind Kant’s Copernican revolution. Commenting on Kant’s claimthat “reason has insight only into that which it produces according to itsown projections,” he adds:

The “previously projected plan” of a nature in general determines in advance theconstitution of the being of entities, to which all questions that are investigatedshould be capable of being related. This prior plan of the being of entities is in-scribed within the basic concepts and principles of the science of nature to whichwe already referred. Hence, what makes the comportment toward entities (onticknowledge) possible is the prior understanding of the constitution of being, onto-logical knowledge. . . . This known quiddity of the entity is brought forward a prioriin ontological knowledge prior to all ontic experience, although precisely for it.Knowledge that brings forth the quiddity [Wasgehalt] of the entity, i.e. knowledgewhich unveils the entity itself, Kant calls “synthetic.”Thus the question concerningthe possibility of ontological knowledge becomes the problem of the essence of apriori synthetic judgments. The instance capable of establishing the legitimacy ofthese material judgments concerning the being of the entity cannot be found in ex-perience, for experience of the entity is itself always already guided by the ontolog-ical understanding of the entity, which in some specific respect must become acces-sible through experience.28

In spite of Heidegger’s brilliant effort to have Kant speak in the language ofBeing and Time, the de-transcendentalization of synthetic a priori knowledgeimplicit in Heidegger’s interpretation of the Copernican revolution be-comes clear just by comparing the way in which the term projection is em-ployed by both authors. For when Kant speaks of projections in his discus-sion of the structure of the empirical sciences, this term refers expressly tothose projections to which pure reason itself gives rise, whereas for Heideggerthese projections are merely a working-out of the basic concepts of theguiding understanding of being,29 that is, they are just (historically alterable)cultural productions. But in this way, the properties of these projections in thetwo conceptions are radically different. For Kant, the appeal to the propertyof apriority implies ascribing to such projections (as products of pure rea-son) a strict transcendental status to which they would owe their necessity anduniversal validity, whereas the prior character of Heidegger’s projectionsstems merely from the fore-structure of understanding.

However, once the transcendental status of the a priori is questioned, itis no longer clear that the features associated with this status can be pre-served in the new conception. In particular, the claim that synthetic a priori

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knowledge determines all experience implies that this knowledge cannot berevised through experience, for no experience can contradict it.30 But it isnot at all clear that the hermeneutic reasons that we have considered so farare sufficient to support this implication. The mere fact that experimenta-tion is guided by prior theoretical assumptions does not by itself imply theirimmunity from revision. Moreover, as Heidegger’s own explanation of theevolution of modern science shows, these assumptions have in fact been re-vised. Thus, additional reasons seem necessary to justify the ascription ofthis important feature of the traditional notion of the a priori to Heideg-ger’s hermeneutic a priori.

In What Is a Thing? Heidegger indeed offers such an additional herme-neutic reason. Drawing on what these days is called the underdeterminationof theory choice by evidence, he tries to make plausible the immunity fromrevision based on experience that he ascribes to the basic principles and ax-ioms of scientific theories. Heidegger appeals to the example of differentexplanations for “one and the same fact” within both the Aristotelian andGalilean paradigms, the fact that under normal conditions in the earth’s fieldof gravitation, heavy bodies pass through a determinate distance faster thanlighter bodies do. (This was described in Aristotelian physics by various in-ert properties lying in the nature of bodies, but was explained by Galileo asthe consequence of the air resistance of bodies made of the same materialbut also of greater weight.) He comments:“Both Galileo and his opponentssaw the same ‘fact.’ But they made the same fact or the same happening vis-ible to themselves in different ways, interpreted it in different ways. Indeed,what appeared to them in each case as the authentic fact and truth was some-thing different.”31 It is thus the incommensurability among different projec-tions that makes it impossible to interpret their historical change as a processof rational revision based on experience. As Heidegger claims in Basic Ques-tions of Philosophy (Grundfragen der Philosophie):“It is simply pointless to mea-sure the Aristotelian doctrine of motion against that of Galileo with respectto results, judging the former as backward and the latter as advanced. For ineach case, nature means something completely different.”32

Given that, according to Heidegger, entities are only accessible through aprior projection of their being, it is clear that entities made accessible bygenuinely different projections are, by definition, not the same entities. Butonly if they were, would it make sense to think of one as a correction of theother. Thus, an old projection cannot be disproved by a new one; at most, itcan be put “out of force” by a different stipulation of what and how thingsare. Conversely, from the point of view of an old projection, the new onecannot be seen as better or worse but simply as meaningless; Heidegger re-marks in What Is a Thing?: “[Newton’s first law of motion] was up until the17th century not at all self-evident. During the preceding fifteen hundred


years it was not only unknown; rather, nature and entities in general were ex-perienced in a way with respect to which this law would have been meaning-less.”33 It is for this reason that Heidegger claims in Being and Time that “be-fore Newton his laws were neither true nor false.”34

This claim is based on Heidegger’s distinction between two differentsenses of truth that correspond to the different senses of knowledge implicithere (namely, synthetic a priori and a posteriori). Whereas ontic knowledgeof entities can be revised through experience and thus can turn out to betrue or false in the standard sense, namely, in the sense of truth as correct-ness, ontological knowledge of the being of entities cannot be so revisedand thus cannot turn out to be (empirically) false. Consequently, it must betrue, although in an entirely different sense, namely, in the sense of uncon-cealment. Accordingly, the instituting of a new projection or world-disclo-sure as an unconcealing of the being of entities is a “happening of truth.”On the one hand, it is a happening in the precise sense that it is a contingent,historical event; on the other hand, it is a happening of truth, to the extentthat it cannot be questioned or revised through the experience that it makespossible and thus exercises an absolute normative authority over those whoshare it. The idea behind Heidegger’s appeal to a more originary sense oftruth could be expressed in the following terms. To the same extent thatmeaning determines reference, truth depends on meaning. After all, onlymeaningful statements can be true or false. Thus, what allows us to distin-guish between meaningful and meaningless statements (i.e., our understand-ing of the being of entities), determines in advance what the possible truthsare for those who share it, determining which ontic truths are accessible tothem. In this sense, truth is relative to a prior understanding of being, whichcannot itself be questioned in its validity. Thus, the attempt to conceive thehistorical changes in our understanding of being as a learning process isbased on an illusion.There is no absolute truth across incommensurable un-derstandings of being.35 They are unrevisable from within and inaccessible(meaningless) from without.

In view of these consequences, though, Heidegger’s attempt to retain thebasic features of Kant’s conception of apriority while transforming themhermeneutically becomes problematic. Precisely to the extent that Heideg-ger’s transformation of the a priori makes us realize that our disclosedness ismerely factical, and thus that no given world-disclosure is universally validor absolute, we must realize that, unfortunately, it is not a happening oftruth. Such a happening cannot borrow the normative feature of absoluteauthority from the notion of truth, for nothing “essentially factical” shouldhave an absolute authority over us. We are back to our initial suspicion thatHeidegger’s characterization of our disclosedness as “essentially factical but

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true” is paradoxical, to say the least. However, the way from a mere suspi-cion to an argument may be harder than it seems. For the only alternativethat Heidegger’s arguments seem to leave open does not look much moreappealing than his own proposal. His arguments show that questioningwhether historical world-disclosures have absolute authority over those whoshare them requires accepting that the projection of the being of entitiesthat they contain can turn out to be (empirically) false. However, this seemsto be tantamount not only to a rejection of the synthetic a priori status assuch; it seems to require defending the implausible claim that all knowledgeis synthetic a posteriori, that is, directly revisable through experience. Thus,it seems that without a Kantian conception of apriority, however herme-neutically transformed, we would be condemned to go back to the oldproblems of either the empiricist or the rationalist conceptions.

In this context, though, I would like to point briefly to what I see as aninteresting way out of the Heideggerian puzzle, namely, Putnam’s conceptionof the “contextually a priori.”36 This conception, on the one hand, coincideswith Heidegger’s in recognizing the hermeneutic roots of the notion ofapriority and thus in relativizing it against the Kantian and rationalist views.On the other hand, though, it shows how this can be done without eitherrelativizing the notion of truth, as Heidegger does, or renouncing the notionof apriority entirely, as empiricists do.

Starting with the similarities between Heidegger’s and Putnam’s concep-tions of apriority, both authors would agree that the distinction betweensynthetic a priori and a posteriori statements is sound and has methodolog-ical significance, as Putnam puts it.37 In particular, both authors identify thesame feature of the traditional conception of apriority as significant andworthy of reinterpretation, namely, the idea that there are statements thatcannot be directly revised by experience or observation.38 As Putnam ex-plains in “‘Two Dogmas’ Revisited”:“There are statements in science whichcan only be overthrown by a new theory . . . and not by observation alone.Such statements have a sort of ‘apriority’ prior to the invention of the newtheory which challenges or replaces them: they are contextually a priori.”39

Finally, in contradistinction to Kant, both authors assume that what is be-hind the distinction is not, as Putnam expresses it, “the constitution of hu-man reason” but, to put it in Heideggerian terms, a hermeneutic conditionof understanding and interpretation.40 Accordingly, both approaches tempo-ralize (or detranscendentalize) the synthetic a priori status by understandingit as internal or relative to a specific body of theory and thus as somethingthat changes historically.

In his article “Rethinking Mathematical Necessity,” Putnam offers a shortoverview of the main features of the conception of the “contextually a priori”


that he had put forward thirty years earlier in his article “It Ain’t NecessarilySo.” He explains:

The way in which I proposed to draw that distinction is as follows: call a statementempirical relative to a body of knowledge B if possible observations . . . would beknown to disconfirm the statement (without drawing on anything outside of thatbody of knowledge). It seemed to me that this captures pretty well the traditionalnotion of an empirical statement. Statements which belong to a body of knowledgebut which are not empirical relative to that body of knowledge I called “necessaryrelative to the body of knowledge.” The putative truths of Euclidean geometrywere, prior to their overthrow, simultaneously synthetic and necessary (in this rela-tivized sense). The point of this new distinction was, as I explained, to emphasizethat there are at any given time some accepted statements which cannot be over-thrown merely by observations, but can only be overthrown by thinking of a wholebody of alternative theory as well. And I insisted (and still insist) that this is a dis-tinction of methodological significance.41

So far, it may seem as if Putnam’s transformation of the traditional notion ofa priori coincides entirely with Heidegger’s, at least to the extent that bothtransformations consist in a relativization of the a priori to specific theoriesor projections. However, if one looks at Putnam’s explanation of the expres-sion “necessary relative to a body of knowledge,” the differences becomeclear. In “It Ain’t Necessarily So” Putnam explains:“This notion of necessityrelative to a body of knowledge is a technical notion being introduced herefor special purposes and to which we give special properties. In particular,when we say that a statement is necessary relative to a body of knowledge,we imply that it is included in that body of knowledge and that it enjoys aspecial role in that body of knowledge. For example, one is not expected togive much of a reason for that kind of statement. But we do not imply thatthe statement is necessarily true, although, of course, it is thought to be trueby someone whose knowledge that body of knowledge is.”42

This is, of course, the crucial difference with Heidegger’s approach. How-ever, the question that this explanation immediately raises is whether this isnot also the crucial difference with any conception of apriority. At least ifone sticks to the traditional conception of apriority, according to which thespecial status or necessity of a priori statements consist in their being “truein all possible worlds,” it seems clear that Putnam’s expression “contextuallya priori” is not meant to designate a kind of a priori knowledge.43 But thenwhat is the justification or the rationale for using the term a priori? Accord-ing to Putnam’s use of the expression, statements that are contextually a pri-ori can indeed be overthrown by later theories and that means precisely thatthey turn out to be (empirically) false. But in his opinion it would bewrong to conclude from this fact that they were synthetic a posteriori allalong. For, relative to the former body of theory, these statements were a

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priori in the specific sense that they could not have been revised through the ex-perience available to that body of theory. This sense of the traditional con-ception of apriority is what Putnam wants to preserve in his notion of the“contextually a priori.” In contradistinction to Heidegger, though, he ques-tions the traditional assumption that the a priori or a posteriori status of astatement is fixed once and for all by virtue of its being the kind of state-ment that it is.44

The rationale behind Putnam’s view could be explained in the followingway. The need for a relativized notion of apriority is due to a repeated his-torical experience, namely, that what was once thought to be a priori trueaccording to a body of theory turned out to be false according to the nexttheory. Now, if one does not question the assumption that “a priori” and “aposteriori” are permanent statuses of statements, this historical fact can onlybe interpreted in one of the following two ways. One option is to questionthat the statement at issue was a priori after all, precisely in view of our laterjudgment. Given that this can happen to any statement (for present evi-dence is in principle irrelevant according to this view), this option seems tolend support to the empiricist view that all statements are empirical state-ments.45 The other possibility is to question that the statement really turnedout to be (empirically) false:46 as Putnam summarizes the argument, “if astatement which appears to be necessary relative to a body of knowledge atone time is not necessary relative to the body of knowledge of a later time,then it is not really the same statement that is involved, words have changedtheir meaning, and the old statement would still be a necessary truth if themeanings of the words had been kept unchanged.”47 His argument againstthis alternative is interesting in our context, for it targets precisely the kindof assumptions that are at the core of Heidegger’s approach.

As we saw before, Heidegger’s argument against the possibility of claim-ing that the Aristotelian doctrine of motion was proven false by Newton’sdoctrine was precisely that “in each case, nature means something com-pletely different.”This is, of course, only the outline of the argument. A dis-placement of meaning becomes an argument against the legitimacy of thecomparison only under Heidegger’s further assumption that meaning deter-mines reference (and thus that a difference in meaning implies ipso facto adifference in reference). Given Heidegger’s assumption that what “nature”in each case means determines that to which the respective theories refer, itfollows that theories with entirely different conceptions of natural entitiescannot be about the same entities. It is for this reason that Heidegger offersa very detailed analysis of Newton’s first law of motion in order to showhow it changes the Aristotelian understanding of the being of entities tosuch an extent that it projects an entirely new ontology; in this sense theAristotelian and Newtonian projections are not about the same entities.48 If


this is the case, though, Heidegger is surely right in claiming that a compar-ison is meaningless, that according to the way in which nature and entitiesin general were experienced in the Aristotelian paradigm, Newton’s law ofmotion “would have been meaningless.” Thus, by the same token, afterNewton’s revolution the Aristotelian doctrine of motion became “meaning-less” rather than empirically false.49

Putnam argues against this kind of view with the help of a different his-torical example, namely, the changes brought about by the development ofnon-Euclidean geometries, but this difference does not affect the argu-ment.50 In “It Ain’t Necessarily So” he focuses on two statements of Euclid-ean geometry, namely, “that one cannot return to one’s starting point bytraveling on a straight line unless one reverses the sense of one’s motion atsome point, and that one can visit an arbitrary number of distinct and dis-joint ‘places’ by continuing far enough on a suitable path.”51 He explains:

If Euclidean geometry is only apparently false owing to a change in the meaning ofwords, then if we keep the meanings of the words unchanged, if we use the words inthe old way, Euclidean geometry must still be true. . . . The statement that there areonly finitely many disjoint “places” to get to, travel as you may, expresses a downright“conceptual impossibility” within the framework of Euclidean geometry. And onecannot say that all that has happened is that we have changed the meaning of theword “path,” because in that case one would be committed to the metaphysical hy-pothesis that, in addition to the “paths” that are still so called, there exist otherswhich are somehow physically inaccessible and additional “places” which are some-how physically inaccessible and which, together with what the physicists presentlyrecognize as places and paths, fill out a Euclidean space.52

But, as Putnam argues:

Where are these places? Where are these other paths? In fact they do not exist. Ifsomeone believes that they exist, then he must invent special physical laws to ex-plain why, try as we may, we never succeed in seeing one of these other places or insticking to one of these other paths. . . . Insofar as the terms “place,” “path,” and“straight line” have any application at all in physical space, they still have the appli-cation that they always had; something that was literally inconceivable has turnedout to be true.53

Here Putnam’s argument shows the untenable consequences of a concep-tion of meaning and reference along Heideggerian lines.54 As we saw be-fore, Heidegger was able to incorporate most of the features of the Kantianconception of apriority into his own hermeneutic conception by incorpo-rating Kant’s transcendental idealism into his approach, although it had beentransformed into a hermeneutic idealism. The key to this transformationwas Heidegger’s assumption that meaning determines reference or, to put itin his own terms, that our understanding of the being of entities is what de-

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termines entities as entities. Accordingly, a metaphysical projection is a pri-ori in a very strong sense. As a projection of meaning it is at the same timeresponsible for the constitution of objects.55 Thus, an alternative projectionis (by definition) a projection of different objects and thus incommensurablewith it. This view seemed to be confirmed by the fact that the experiencemade possible by the development of the new theory was indeed inaccessi-ble within the framework of the prior body of theory. For what this fact in-dicates is that, from the point of view of the prior body of theory, objectsunder the descriptions of the later theory were indeed inaccessible, that is,“literally inconceivable.” However, as Putnam argues, the same cannot beclaimed of the objects of the prior theory. Given that they were already ac-cessible, unless the mere existence of the new theory made them literallydisappear, this view owes us an explanation of why these “different objects”are no longer there. In view of this difficulty, it seems a much better optionto question the assumption that meaning determines reference, that is, torecognize that a projection of meaning is simply the best available accountof objects, one that may turn out to be incorrectly described. Of course,this recognition is nothing other than a rejection of transcendental idealismin its hermeneutic variety.56 As a consequence, a projection can be consid-ered a priori only in a much weaker sense. For it is only the lack of an al-ternative way of accessing objects that makes a given understanding of theirbeing contextually a priori within a given theory. Statements that expresssuch understanding (definitions, axioms, etc.) do indeed have the special sta-tus that Heidegger ascribes to them, namely, they express the ontology ofthe theory. But, contrary to Heidegger’s view, this only means that theycannot be meaningfully revised until a better account of the same objects is avail-able. However, once such an account becomes available, the status of theprior statements changes in a very important way. Precisely as a conse-quence of having more than one way to access the same objects, these state-ments no longer have the status of defining which objects are being referredto; they just become one way among others of describing them and thusmay turn out to be (empirically) false.57 Thus, to put it in Heideggerianterms, what had the status of ontological knowledge in the previous theoryturns out to be just ontic knowledge for the following one.

Seen in this light, Putnam’s conception of the “contextually apriori” ques-tions the core assumption of Heidegger’s interpretation of the ontologicaldifference, namely, that there is an absolute and permanent dichotomy be-tween two different kinds of knowledge (ontic and ontological) and theirrespective kinds of truths. According to Putnam, a statement is contextuallya priori relative to a given body of theory, if it is not possible within such abody of theory to specify a way in which it could be actually false.58 As longas this is the case, Putnam would agree with Heidegger in claiming that this


statement is “indispensable” for this body of theory in the specific sense thatit cannot be questioned from within. But this by no means excludes thepossibility that in the future some rival theory may be developed that willin fact show a specific way in which such a statement may actually be falseand thus in need of revision. In this sense, Heidegger’s relativization of theKantian conception of apriority seems plausible in tracing its roots back to ahermeneutic origin, namely, the lack of interpretative alternatives in a givenhistorical situation. But in the wake of Heidegger’s hermeneutic idealismthe lack of interpretative alternatives turns out to be an intrinsic (and thuspermanent) condition of any understanding of being as such, for any alter-native to it must be necessarily meaningless. However, without any inde-pendent reasons to accept this idealist assumption it does not seem plausibleto interpret the lack of alternatives in a given hermeneutic situation as be-ing anything more than what it seems, namely, an entirely contingent fact.To the extent that this situation cannot be overcome at will, it seems indeedjustified to confer a special status to our understanding of being as contex-tually a priori. But, to the extent that it could in principle be overcome,there seems to be no reason to interpret this status in the normative termsof an absolute authority over us that knowledge a priori was supposed tohave before its hermeneutic transformation.

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The more I study nature around home, the more I am moved by it. The thunderstorm, perceived not only in its more extrememanifestations, but precisely as a power and feature among thevarious other forms of the sky, the light, active as a principleand resembling fate, working to impart national shape so thatwe might possess something sacred, the urgency of its comingsand goings, the particular character of its forests, and the way inwhich the diversities of nature all converge in one area, so thatall the holy places of the earth come together in a single place,and the philosophical light around my window—all this is nowmy joy. Let me not forget that I have come this far.—Friedrich Hölderlin1

hans-georg gadamer, perhaps Heidegger’s best-known student, describedhis own work as an attempt to adhere to, and to make accessible in a newway, the line of thinking developed by Heidegger in his essay, first given as aseries of lectures three times between 1935 and 1936, “The Origin of theWork of Art” (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”).2 In this essay Heideggerargues that the work of art is not to be construed in representational termsbut rather in its character, as a work, in opening and establishing a world.Heidegger takes as his central example a Greek temple (in fact, he seems tohave in mind a very specific temple, the temple of Hera at Paestum), ofwhich he writes:

A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middleof the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this con-cealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico, By meansof the temple, the god is present in the temple. . . . [The temple] first fits togetherand at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and

chapter

Heidegger’s Topology of Being

Jeff Malpas

9

decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse ofthis open relational context is the world of this historical people. . . . The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world . . . the temple, in its standing there, firstgives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.3

Crucial to this account is the role of the artwork in the establishing of aworld, where such “establishing” is seen as identical with the “happening” oftruth, understood, not uncontroversially, as that which first allows things tobe seen and so enables the possibility of particular truths. Heidegger thusfocuses on the way in which a particular thing opens up a realm of under-standing and illumination that goes beyond the particular thing itself. Theparticular thing, most characteristically the artwork, stands at the center of alarger horizon in which other things, an entire world, are brought to lightwithin an essentially relational context (for they are shown in their relationto the thing that stands at the center of the horizon). For Gadamer, this ac-count provides the basis for the development of a hermeneutic theory aswell as an aesthetics; for me, what is of interest is its broader significance forphilosophy and ontology—as well as for the idea of the transcendental.

In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” we see Heidegger trying to articu-late what he later comes to call the “topology of being,” that is, an accountof the “place” in which things come to presence, in which they come to be.In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he refers to this “place” using the Ger-man Stätte, but elsewhere he talks of it in terms of Topos, Ort, or Ortschaft (allof which can be translated as “place,” although Ortschaft is sometimes givenas “settlement” or “locality”). Talk of “place” here carries a certain ambigu-ity, for the “place of being” names both a generalized structure that is vari-ously described by Heidegger at different stages in his thinking (in “TheOrigin of the Work of Art” it is described in terms of the “strife” betweenthe concealment of Earth and the openness of World that is the twofold es-tablished in and through the work that is the temple), but since that structureis always a structure given particular instantiation in this place, so it alsonames each and every place in and around which things are brought to pres-ence and the “worlding” of world occurs.

The idea of the inquiry into being as an inquiry into the place of beingis apparent very early in Heidegger’s career, in his lecture notes from thecourse he gave in the summer semester of 1923 in Freiburg. There we findhim preoccupied with what he calls “facticity,” which he characterizes interms of the way in which Dasein is “in each case ‘this’ Dasein in its being-there for a while at a particular time.”4 Facticity is that aspect of our ownbeing according to which we find ourselves already given over to things, ac-cording to which our being is indeed always a being there—according towhich it is always already “in” the world. If the analysis of facticity is a cen-tral concern here, then, so too is Heidegger concerned to investigate the na-

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ture of the world and of the “wherein” that characterizes our own being inrelation to the world. The world, claims Heidegger, is that which environsor surrounds us and also that toward which we are oriented, about whichwe are concerned and to which we attend. But how do we encounter theworld? And if our encounter with the world is always an encounter withrespect to particular things and situations, how are these encountered?

Heidegger proposes to answer these questions by looking to our every-day, precritical encounter with things. The example on which he focuses isan ordinary thing of the home or the workplace, a table. How is the tablefirst encountered? We might be inclined to say, as a material thing, as some-thing “with such and such a weight, such and such a color, such and such ashape,”5 as a thing that also offers an infinity of possible perceptual appear-ances. The thing as material, natural thing can be distinguished from thething as it might be evaluated or used—as it might be significant or mean-ingful. Heidegger denies, however, that the thing grasped as mere object, ei-ther as natural object or as meaningful object, is what is first encountered.Instead what is prior is the “in the world” as such, as that is articulated inand around specific things such as the table, but not any table, this table, thetable before us now.Thus Heidegger tells us,“This schema must be avoided:What exists are subjects and objects, consciousness and being.”6 We cannotfirst posit things aside from our dealings with those things nor the selves in-volved in those dealings aside from things. Instead Heidegger turns to ananalysis of an example taken from his own being-there, a description of thetable in his family home:

What is there in the room there at home is the table (not “a” table among manyother tables in other rooms and other houses) at which one sits in order to write,have a meal, sew, play. Everyone sees this right away, e.g. during a visit: it is a writingtable, a dining table, a sewing table—such is the primary way it is a being encoun-tered in itself. This characteristic of “in order to do something” is not merely im-posed on the table by relating and assimilating it to something else which it is not.Its standing-there in the room means: Playing this role in such and such characteris-tic use. This and that about it is “impractical,” unsuitable. That part is damaged. Itnow stands in a better spot in the room than before—there’s better lighting, for ex-ample. . . . Here and there it shows lines—the boys like to busy themselves at thetable. Those lines are not just interruptions in the paint, but rather: it was the boysand it still is.This side is not the east side, and this side so many cm. shorter than theother, but rather the one at which my wife sits in the evening when she wants tostay up and read, there at the table we had such and such a discussion that time,there that decision was made with a friend at that time, there that work was written atthat time, there that holiday celebrated at that time. That is the table as such it isthere in the temporality of everydayness.7

There are a number of points that are worth noting in this passage. The firstis the way in which Heidegger takes the encounter with the world to have

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its origin and focus in our prior involvement with a particular thing that isitself implicated in a larger system of relationships. The world is thus under-stood as relational but also as brought to focus around particular nodalpoints within the web of the relations that constitute the world. Moreover,in the encounter with the thing, we also encounter ourselves and others.What is primary, then, is not the bare encounter with some “de-worlded,”disconnected “object,” nor do we first find ourselves as that which stands inopposition to that object, but instead we find self and thing presented to-gether as part of one system of interrelation. With more recent philosophi-cal developments in mind we may say that the account Heidegger offershere is a form of “externalist” theory of the self; the account also bearscomparison with Davidson’s externalist position as articulated in paperssuch as “Three Varieties of Knowledge” (although there are notable differ-ences).8 But it may be better to say that what Heidegger does here is to re-ject both externalist and internalist accounts, presenting instead a view ac-cording to which what comes first is the world in which both self and thingare bound together and in which each is articulated in relation to the other.

The account that is adumbrated in the 1923 lectures on facticity is, ofcourse, further developed in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) published in 1927.The question of being posed in the latter work is answered by looking to ananalysis of the structure of the mode of being of a particular being—the be-ing for whom being is itself in question and to which Heidegger gives thename (at least in this work) Dasein. From the outset it is important to note,however, that Heidegger’s question of being—not only in this work butthroughout his thinking—is not a question that asks for some underlyingprinciple or definition of being, nor is it a question that asks for some sort ofanalysis of the internal ontological structure of independently existing enti-ties. The question of being is not a question about how things, already un-derstood as present to us, are constituted as the beings that they are, but, priorto this, it asks how it is that any being can even come to be present.

In terms of the existing philosophical tradition, Heidegger’s question ofbeing must be understood as more closely related to the Kantian transcen-dental question concerning the conditions for the possibility of synthetic apriori judgment than it is to contemporary inquiries concerning identity,causality, and so forth as these relate to the structure of “reality” or the uni-verse. Indeed, while this way of understanding the question of being is im-portant for Heidegger’s work as a whole, it is especially important for Beingand Time, and the work of the late 1920s and early 1930s, precisely becauseof the way in which Heidegger’s own thought during this period takes theform of a concentrated engagement with Kant, particularly with the Cri-tique of Pure Reason.Thus the projected second Part of Being and Time was tohave included a “de-struction” of the history of ontology, in which Kant

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was a major focus, while the second major work Heidegger published afterBeing and Time was entirely devoted to the Critique of Pure Reason—Heideg-ger’s so-called Kantbuch, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Kant und dasProblem der Metaphysik) (1929).

Since Being and Time takes the question of being as a question to be pur-sued through an analysis of the structure of Dasein—literally there/here-being—and since Dasein is understood as being-in-the-world, so the analysisof Dasein is also an analysis of the structure of world or worldhood. As inthe earlier work, this analysis gives priority to the relational structure of ac-tive engagement in which both we and the things around us are brought to-gether and mutually articulated.Thus Heidegger focuses the early part of hisanalysis in Being and Time on Dasein as being-in-the-world, and so on thestructure of “being-in” and worldhood. As in the earlier work, Heideggersees the world as established through the interrelations that obtain betweenDasein and the things around it, as well as through the interrelations betweenthose things as such. Indeed, Heidegger analyzes the structure of world interms of the structure of “equipment” (das Zeug), that together constitutes asystem of relationships or “assignments” (one system of such assignments, orpart of one, is seen in the workshop), and he famously talks of the way inwhich the world is itself brought to light through the breakdown in the sys-tem of relationships between equipment—through the broken tool:

The structure of the Being of what is ready-to-hand as equipment is determined byreferences or assignments . . . When an assignment has been disturbed—whensomething is unusable for some purpose—then the assignment becomes explicit.Even now, of course, it has not become explicit as an ontological structure; but ithas become explicit ontically for the circumspection which comes up against thedamaging of the tool. When an assignment to some particular “towards-this” hasbeen thus circumspectively aroused, we catch sight of the “towards-this” itself, andalong with it everything concerned with the work—the whole “workshop”—asthat wherein concern already dwells. The context of equipment is lit up, not assomething never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in cir-cumspection. With this totality, however, the world announces itself.9

The argument of Being and Time also makes clear, however, that the characterof equipmental engagement is derivative of the structure of temporality—anidea present too in The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Hermeneutik der Faktizität).The ordering of self and thing within the larger horizon of the world is itselfdetermined by the ordering of past, present, and future (something alreadyindicated in the earlier work) and captured in terms of the notions of care(Sorge) and being-toward-death, both of which can be taken as tied essen-tially to facticity. It is through the being in question of Dasein’s being, whichis evident in care and in the recognition of death, that beings are themselvesbrought to presence. We might also say that it is through Dasein’s “being-


there,” and so through the Da that is integral to Dasein’s own being, and thatis worked out in and through Dasein’s concrete involvement with things, thatany other being can be brought to light. The structure that is evident here isessentially the same as the structure that we saw earlier in “The Origin of theWork of Art”: the coming to presence of things, the establishing of world,the happening of truth, occurs in and through a particular place or site, inand through the temple, in and through the Da, the here/there, the place, ofSein.What distinguishes Being and Time from the later discussions, however, isthat the framework of Being and Time includes no specific reference to topol-ogy but is instead pursued from within a “transcendental” framework (onethat is also hermeneutically and phenomenologically nuanced) that is in ac-cord with the Kantian orientation of the earlier work.

It is significant, particularly in light both of Being and Time’s transcenden-tal orientation and of Heidegger’s own later critique of the earlier work,that in Being and Time it is the projective activity of Dasein that seems to es-tablish the ordering of equipment and the ordering of the world that comesfrom this. Indeed, the projective activity of Dasein is itself based in Dasein’sown being as that is determined by care, being-toward-death, and temporal-ity. In this respect, temporality can be seen as opening up space—the spacewithin which the structure of equipmentality is itself articulated—andthereby establishing a world. Rather like Bergson, Heidegger appears hereto be temporalizing space, in reaction, perhaps, to the dominant spatial-ization of time. But insofar as the opening up of world is indeed based inDasein’s projecting character, and insofar as this is already presupposed inthe idea of Dasein as the being for whom being is in question, so the struc-ture of being, and the structure of world, is given just in the questioning,and questionable, character of Dasein’s own being. World is founded in theprojection of Dasein, which is not itself something that is determined byDasein but is simply Dasein’s own mode of being as such. The same is truein “The Origin of the Work of Art,” although there the character of Daseinas “projecting” has been taken over by the role of the poet, or perhaps thestatesman, as founding a world in the founding of a people and a destiny.

It might seem, however, that in its general form the account I have so faroutlined is problematic, if for no other reason than that it appears to be cir-cular. If what is at issue is the coming to presence or appearing of thingsthat is identical with the establishing of world, and if this occurs only in re-lation to that kind of being which is being-in-the-world but which is itselfworked out in relation to things and to world as such, then isn’t this a strat-egy that looks to explain world, and the appearing of things within it, onthe basis of that same world? Put more charitably, one might argue thatHeidegger provides no real explanation, only a description. There is some-thing right about this point—but it is correct only inasmuch as it reflects a

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core point in Heidegger’s own approach. As Heidegger understands it, thequestion of being is not a question that is answered by looking to some ex-planatory or causal foundation, although to do so is precisely what meta-physics has traditionally attempted. But Heidegger claims that the metaphys-ical tradition has consistently misunderstood or forgotten being. Being isnot some being apart from or in addition to beings. And that means there isnothing to which one can appeal in answer to the question of being otherthan being itself. It is this circularity that Heidegger himself brings to atten-tion at a number of points in Being and Time.10 So what then is being?Nothing other than the appearing or presencing of beings as such, and thatmeans that being and world, or at least what Heidegger calls the “worldingof world,” are closely tied together. Neither being nor world, however, canbe explicated other than through an articulation of the structural elementsthat are integral to them. Thus the only possible strategy for Heidegger toadopt is indeed a certain “descriptive” strategy—a strategy that tries to ex-plicate being through uncovering the structure within which certain ele-ments are interrelated and unified. In this respect, Heidegger takes theKantian idea of “analytic,” as set out in the Critique of Pure Reason, as the ba-sis for his own methodology. Thus Heidegger writes: “In the ontologicalsense, ‘the analytic’ is not a reduction into elements, but the articulation ofthe [a priori] unity of a composite structure [Strukturgefüge]. This is also es-sential in my concept of the ‘analytic of Da-sein.’”11 Elsewhere he talks ofthe “methodological tendency” “to derive everything and anything fromsome simple primal ground”—a tendency he rejects in favor of a structureof what he terms “equiprimordial elements.”12

Gadamer himself addresses the aspect of Heidegger’s approach that is atissue here, discussing its origins in the phenomenological method but alsoemphasizing its “descriptive” and “visionary” character—Heidegger was, hesays,“a thinker who sees”:

And this “seeing” occurs not only in momentary evocations in which a strikingword is found and an intuition flashes for a fleeting moment. The entire conceptualanalysis is not presented as an argued progression from one concept to another;rather the analysis is made by approaching the same “thing” from the most diverseperspectives, thus giving the conceptual description the character of the plastic arts,that is, the three-dimensionality of tangible reality.13

Heidegger looks always, in his analyses of being, to the elaboration of a singlestructure. In doing so, he does not seek to explain by looking to some prin-ciple outside or beyond what is to be explained. Here his strategy is usefullyillustrated by appeal to the idea, if not quite of topology, then of topography.The method of topographical surveying is one that looks to build up a mapof a certain landscape, not by looking to some single vantage point from


which all can be seen or by deducing that landscape from some underlyingand determining structure, but rather by looking to the way that landscapeis constituted through the inter-relations between the landmarks that makeit up—a set of interrelations worked out through repeated triangulation andtraverse.14 This “topographical” method is what essentially underlies Heideg-ger’s later development of the idea of topology—of what he terms a Topolo-gie des Seyns—although in his earlier work it is also associated with an ex-plicitly transcendental mode of proceeding. Indeed, the transcendental canperhaps itself be understood as attempting something like such a topologyinasmuch as it too depends on the articulation of the unity of a set of inter-connected elements within a single field.15

Heidegger comes only gradually to articulate the ideas that are crucialhere. And the way he sets those ideas out in Being and Time presents someproblems that are quite distinct from any simple “begging of the question.”Those problems can be seen to underlie the shift in Heidegger’s thinkingthat occurs around the time of “The Origin of the Work of Art” and in theperiod immediately before and after—the famous “Turning” or “Reversal”in his thinking (die Kehre) which he presented not as a break with his ear-lier work so much as a continuation and radicalization of it. The Turning is,however, an equivocal notion.16 It already appears in the plan of Being andTime, inasmuch as Division Three of Part 1 of that work was supposed tohave involved a “turning” from the temporality of Dasein to the temporalityof being. Indeed, a common reading of the Turning in Heidegger’s thoughtis that it is also to be construed as a turning from Dasein, from human be-ing, to being as such. The Turning is thus often held to have its origin inHeidegger’s inability to complete the project set out in Being and Time.There is no doubt that the Turning is associated with Heidegger’s shift awayfrom the framework of Being and Time (although that framework is still pre-sent in Heidegger’s thinking until at least 1933, when it remains clearly pre-sent in the background of the infamous Rektoratsrede), but it is not to besimply assimilated to the same turning that was to have been accomplishedin Being and Time. In fact, the Turning refers to a movement in thinking it-self, a movement that involves a turning back to being from the usual for-getfulness of being that characterizes metaphysics. In this respect, and inas-much as it does indeed represent a modification (but not rejection) of theproject partially carried out in Being and Time, the Turning can be seen toinvolve a turning away from the transcendental, and, one might also say,metaphysical character of that project.Thus Heidegger himself criticizes Be-ing and Time, particularly in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (“Brief über den‘Humanismus’”) of 1949, for remaining still too much within the frame-work of traditional metaphysics.17 Indeed, what Heidegger says of Being andTime in this regard is especially illuminating. Repeating a crucial sentence

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from the introduction to Being and Time:“Being is the transcendens pure andsimple,”18 Heidegger comments that “whether the definition of being as thetranscendens pure and simple really does name the simple essence of the truthof being—this and this alone is the primary question for a thinking that at-tempts to think the truth of being.”19

The notion of transcendence that is at issue here is a notion central tomuch of Heidegger’s thinking at least from the period 1926–29, but thecontent of the notion requires some clarification. In The Metaphysical Foun-dations of Logic (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik) from 1928, Heideggerwrites that:

Transcendence means the surpassing, the going beyond. . . . Transcendence is . . . theprimordial constitution of the subjectivity of a subject. . . . To be a subject means totranscend. . . . Transcendence does not mean crossing a barrier that has fenced offthe subject in an inner space. But what gets crossed over is the being itself that canbecome manifest to the subject on the very basis of the subject’s transcendence. . . .Therefore, what Dasein surpasses in its transcendence is not a gap or barrier “be-tween” itself and objects. But beings, among which Dasein factically is, get surpassedby Dasein . . . beings get surpassed and can subsequently become objects. . . . That“toward which” the subject, as subject, transcends is not an object, not at all this orthat being. . . . That toward which the subject transcends is what we call world . . .because this primordial being of Dasein, as surpassing, crosses over to a world, wecharacterize the basic phenomenon of Dasein’s transcendence with the expressionbeing-in-the-world.20

This focus on the problem of transcendence, on being as transcendence, andon transcendence as naming the structure of human Dasein, of subjectivity,is characteristic of the framework that Heidegger develops in Being andTime.21 It also indicates the indebtedness of that work to Husserl and Kant,and so the extent to which that work operates within a transcendental andphenomenological framework.

As Heidegger uses the term transcendental, however, it refers us to twosenses of transcendence. The first is the sense outlined above—the way inwhich Dasein transcends beings in the direction of world (or, as Heideggerputs it elsewhere, transcends objects in the direction of their objectness).The second is the sense involved in the idea of the transcendent as thatwhich goes beyond world and from which Kant himself clearly distin-guishes the idea of the transcendental.22 The transcendental can be said tobe that which underlies the structure of transcendence in both of thesesenses—as it refers us to the structure that makes possible transcendence inthe first sense and also marks off as unfounded transcendence in the secondsense23—although it is to the first of these two senses that it relates more di-rectly, and so, for Heidegger, the transcendental is most often understood asthat which makes possible the transcendence of things in the direction of


world. As it underlies such transcendence, so the analysis of the transcen-dental structure is always directed at the analysis of the structure of Daseinon the basis of which such transcendence is possible. In this respect, thetranscendental as it appears in Heidegger is always associated with a particu-lar set of philosophical, one might almost say metaphysical, commitments,and it is this on which Heidegger himself seems to focus in his discussionsof the transcendental. The transcendental is always, for Heidegger, tied tothe attempt to articulate the possibility of transcendence as it is grounded inthe structure of human Dasein and understood in terms of Dasein’s surpass-ing of beings in the direction of world and of being. It is perhaps no sur-prise, then, that Heidegger comes to view Being and Time itself as indeed stillenmeshed in metaphysics inasmuch as it remains preoccupied with theproblem of transcendence. Moreover, since the focus on transcendence, andon the transcendental, is also part of Heidegger’s engagement with Kant, soHeidegger’s working through the problem of the transcendental is also aworking through Kant—a working through from which he eventuallyemerges in the mid-1930s. As Heidegger later wrote in the preface to therepublished edition of the Kant book:“With Being and Time alone—: soon/clear that we did not enter into/the real question. . . . A refuge—underwayand/not new discoveries in Kant Philology.”24

The “Turning” in Heidegger’s thinking is thus itself a turn back to beingaway from the oblivion of being that is characteristic of metaphysics, awayfrom forgetfulness of the proper relation between being and human being,away from the transcendental and the focus on transcendence, away fromthe preoccupation with the objectness of the object. So, in Contributions toPhilosophy ( from Enowning) (Beiträge zur Philosophie [Vom Ereignis] ), Heideg-ger writes:

Even when “transcendence” is grasped differently than up to now, namely as surpass-ing and not as the super-sensible as a being, even then this determination all too easilydissembles what is ownmost to Dasein. For, even in this way, transcendence still pre-supposes an under and this-side [Unten und Diesseits] and is in danger of still beingmisinterpreted after all as the action of an “I” and a subject.25

Moreover, just as the idea of transcendence drops away, so too is the notionof Dasein reconfigured. Thus, while Heidegger often insists that Being andTime had already clearly rejected any simply subjectivism or idealism, nev-ertheless he also tells us that “in Being and Time, Da-sein still stands in theshadow of the ‘anthropological,’ the ‘subjectivistic,’ and the ‘individualist,’etc.”26 In fact, the term Dasein appears less frequently in Heidegger’s workafter the mid-1930s. And if we look to the Beiträge, some ten or so yearslater than Being and Time, we find that Da-sein is regularly hyphenated andalso seems no longer to refer to the essence of human being in the way it

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had in 1927.27 If Da-sein does continue to refer to the essence of human,that is, mortal, being, then it does so by naming that in the sway of whichmortal being always stands but which also encompasses the other elementsof world as their origin and ground. In the Beiträge, Da-sein names some-thing much closer to a topos, a place, and instead of the structure of being-in-the-world that was the focus of Being and Time, Heidegger now elabo-rates a structure that is the structure of the Da of Sein, the topos of being.Da-sein is the opened, cleared realm, the “between” that unites as well asdifferentiates the elements of world, thereby allowing the world itself toopen (indeed, the world is this disclosive opening), revealing the things thatstand within that world, giving to humans the possibility of a history and afuture. As Heidegger comments, “Da-sein is to be taken as time-space, notin the sense of the usual concepts of time and space but as the site for themoment of the grounding of the truth of being,”28 and again: “Da-sein isthe turning point in the turning of Ereignis. . . . Da-sein is the between [dasZwischen] between man (as history-grounding) and gods (in their history).The between [Zwischen] [is] not one that first ensues from the relation ofgods to humans, but rather that between [Zwischen] which above all groundsthe time-space for the relation.”29 Moreover, while Da-sein is to be under-stood as this “between,” it is nevertheless not to be understood in terms oftranscendence:“This ‘between’ is, however, not a ‘transcendence’ with refer-ence to man. Rather it is the opposite: that open to which man belongs asthe founder and preserver wherein as Da-sein he is en-owned [er-eignet] bybe-ing itself—be-ing that holds sway as nothing other than en-owning[Ereignis].”30 Transcendence itself can only be understood on the basis of thisowning and opening. The Turning is thus the Turning of the Ereignis itself,in which mortals are brought into the sway of being and in which a worldis established through the opening of the Da, the there, the place.

The shift away from transcendence, away from human Dasein as identicalwith transcendence, is inevitably, of course, a shift away from the frameworkof Being and Time. Gadamer directs attention to a marginal note in Being andTime in which Heidegger talks of “the place of the understanding of Being”(Stätte des Seinsverständnisses), an expression with which, says Gadamer,“Hei-degger wants to mediate between the older point of departure from Dasein(in which its being is at stake) and the new movement of thought of the‘there’ [Da] in which das Sein or Being forms a clearing. In the word place[Stätte] this latter emphasis comes to the fore: it is the scene of an event andnot primarily the site of an activity by Dasein.”31 The core concepts are nowthe concepts of truth, understood as aletheia, uncovering, and openness, asthe opening of the place of being. Thus, at the end of the 1964 essay “TheEnd of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (“Das Ende der Philosophieund die Aufgabe des Denkens”), Heidegger writes:“Does the name for the


task of thinking then read instead of Being and Time: Opening and Pres-ence?”32 In this way we can characterize the Heideggerian shift away fromthe transcendental precisely in terms of a shift in how Heidegger understandsthe Da. Yet in characterizing the shift in this way, what remains constant isthe essentially topological orientation of Heidegger’s thought—an orienta-tion that is constant from the period of Being and Time and earlier, throughto the Beiträge, and after. Heidegger’s abandonment of the transcendental isthus an abandonment of the preoccupation with transcendence, not an aban-donment of the topology that is itself a crucial element in the idea of thetranscendental and that is even present, I would suggest, in Kant.33

The structure that we see set out in the Beiträge is developed further inHeidegger’s later thinking. In particular, the Ereignis structure we find in theBeiträge, expressed in terms of the Fourfold (Das Geviert) of earth, sky, gods,and mortals—itself understood as the gathering and establishing of world—isthe explicit focus of essays such as “The Thing” (“Das Ding”) and “BuildingDwelling Thinking” (“Bauen Wohnen Denken”), from 1950 and 1951. But asin his earlier work, this Ereignis, this gathering of world and of the elementsof world to one another, while it is a gathering that can be described in waysthat are not dependent on any particular place or thing, nevertheless occursalways in relation to specific things and places. In “Building Dwelling Think-ing,” Heidegger uses the example of a bridge, and one of the bridges he hasin mind is clearly the Alte Brücke in the city of Heidelberg:

The bridge swings over the stream “with ease and power.” It does not just connectbanks that are already there.The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses thestream. . . . With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the otherexpanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land intoeach other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around thestream. . . .The bridge lets the stream run its course and at the same time grants theirway to mortals so that they may come and go from shore to shore. . . . Always andever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to andfro. . . .The bridge gathers, as a passage that crosses, before the gods—whether we ex-plicitly think of, and visibly give thanks for, their presence. . . . The bridge gathers toitself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals. The bridge is a place. Assuch it allows a space into which earth and sky, gods and mortals are admitted.34

Significantly, while the bridge only appears within a cleared realm, a world,that itself necessarily involves mortals, as it also involves the gods, earth, andsky, still the bridge is not something that is brought into salience merelythrough the projective activity of mortals. The building of the bridge issomething mortals do, but the appearing of the bridge as a bridge is broughtabout through the worlding of the world, that is, through the world’s comingto be as world, through the gathering of the elements of world within thedifferentiating unity of the Fourfold. In this latter respect, the ordering and

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establishing of world that enables the bridge to appear as a bridge also en-ables the mortals themselves to come to light. This means, of course, thatthe mortals come to light precisely as mortal—as beings that die—but hereit is not so much death as our “ownmost possibility” that is given primaryemphasis—death as a mark of radical finitude, of essential uncanniness,which was the focus of Being and Time—but rather death as nothingness, asthe ultimate ungroundedness of things, death as the marker of our belong-ing to the constant “sway” of being.

Recognizing our being as mortals, then, is not a matter simply of facingup to the fact that we die, but more significantly, it means recognizing theway in which we are already given over to the world, to the Fourfold thatalso encompasses the gods, earth, and sky—it is a matter of recognizing ourown belonging within the sway of being, of our own already being gath-ered into the opening and presencing of what Heidegger calls Ereignis. Tosay that we dwell is to say that we already belong, as mortals, to the Four-fold, but it is also to call upon us to grasp the fact of that dwelling. Andwhile Heidegger is not clear on this point, dwelling would seem to refer toboth our prior belonging in this fashion (to our being always already givenover to dwelling and so to gathering of Ereignis) and to the possibility ofthat prior belonging itself becoming a determining element in the mannerof that dwelling. Dwelling is a matter of our prior belonging, and it is also amatter of our being recalled to that belonging—a matter of remembranceand of return.35

The happening of world that occurs in and through the gathering of theFourfold is also, in the language of the Beiträge, the happening of Da-sein—it is, we might say, the “place-ing of being.” Similarly, Ereignis is a matter oftopoi-esis—a gathering/opening of/into place. As the manner of mortal be-ing is dwelling, so dwelling is always a being-in-place (and not merely “being-in-the-world”).Yet although the place at issue here is not the idea of someabstract generality—we are always brought to place here/there, in this veryspot—still there is no one place that can be given primacy here, no oneplace that is privileged in respect of being, no one place that alone allows usproperly to dwell. The happening of place, as a gathering of world, and soas an opening and presencing, does not distinguish between the Black Forestor a Greek island, between Times Square or the Australian outback. Theremay well be differences in the exact manner of the gathering and happen-ing of place in these cases, but in each there is a placing, a gathering, anEreignis. Aside from attentiveness to the different character of each suchplacing, the difficulty is to keep sight of the way in which the happening ofbeing is always such a coming to place, and so is always concretely placed inthis way and yet is not exclusive to any one such place. Yet inevitably, ofcourse, one will find oneself calling upon one’s own place, one’s vocabulary


of place, in the attempt to talk about the happening, the place-ing, that is atissue here, and Heidegger is certainly no exception in this regard.

Nevertheless, inasmuch as Heidegger is indeed centrally concerned to un-derstand place as the Da of Being, so the place he seeks to understand is notany particular place but rather the place that makes every such place possible.In the “Conversation on a Country Path” (“Feldweg-Gespräch”), we findHeidegger struggling to find a language in which to express this idea.

The region gathers, just as if nothing were happening, each to each and each to allinto an abiding, while resting in itself. Regioning is a gathering and re-sheltering,for an expanded resting in an abiding. So the region itself is at once an expanse andan abiding. It abides into the expanse of resting. It expands into the abiding of whathas been freely turned toward itself.36

This regioning is just the idea of the coming to be of a place that is theplace of the Fourfold, but that is not a place that looks inward so much asexpanding outward—a place that opens into world. Indeed, the Heidegger-ian idea that the fundamental concern of thinking is to uncover and to ar-ticulate this “place of being,” which is that which opens out to a worldwhile it also enables mortals to see themselves in their relation to the ele-ments of the world—earth, sky, and gods—can be seen as telling us some-thing about both world and place. On this account, place is indeed anopening or clearing, while the world is that which can only come to passinasmuch as it is opened up through such a clearing. Yet no one clearingachieves this: the clearing occurs everywhere that gods and mortals, earthand sky are brought together. Only in and through such a clearing is worldpossible, because only in and through such a clearing can the interconnect-edness of world be brought into its proper, if differentiated, unity. Moreoveronly in and through such a clearing can world be constituted as an openinginto possibility, into infinity:

Infinite means that the ends and the sides, the regions of the relation do not standby themselves cut-off and one-sidedly; rather, freed of one-sidedness and finitude,they belong infinitely to one another in the relation which “thoroughly” holdsthem together from its centre. The centre, so-called because it centres, that is, medi-ates, is neither earth nor heaven, God nor man. The in-finity that is to be thoughthere is abysmally different from that which is merely without end, which, becauseof its uniformity, allows no growth. On the other hand the “more tender relation”of earth and heaven, God and man, can become more in-finite. For what is notone-sided can come more purely to light from the intimacy in which the namedfour are bound to each other.37

The world is thus not, contra Wittgenstein,“all that is the case”—it is not amere sum or totality—but a complex, differentiated, and infinite unity.

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The emphasis on the complex unity of the world, and on place as the fo-cal point for such unity, is particularly significant, for it is already evident inthe idea of the transcendental as concerned with explicating the structure oftranscendence in terms of the integral connection of what Heidegger terms“equiprimordial” elements. The problem with the transcendental is that itsees the structure at issue here as having to be grounded in the structure ofa Dasein that is itself tied, in one way or another, to human subjectivity.Moreover, inasmuch as it is already based on the idea of an explication ofthe structure of transcendence as a “surpassing” by Dasein in the directionof world, so it already presents a bifurcation between Dasein as that whichis the ground of transcendence and world as that toward which transcen-dence must move.Transcendence thus arises as a problem out of the distinc-tion between Dasein and its world that the transcendental aims to over-come—this is itself evident in the bifurcation in the idea of transcendencethat enables it to refer both to the idea of Dasein’s reaching out beyond ob-jects to their objectness, beyond beings to world, and to that which goes be-yond Dasein and world. The problem with the transcendental, then, is thatin spite of its already topological orientation, it is nevertheless predicated ona way of understanding being that is already disjunctive, already threatensthe unity of being’s occurrence. Indeed, one might go so far as to say thatthis disjunction remains present to some extent in that central Heidegger-ian idea of the ontological difference and its emphasis on the distinction be-tween being and beings. It is precisely for this reason that the ontologicaldifference must be understood not in terms of the disjunction between be-ing and beings (this is how the metaphysical tradition has understood, andthereby misunderstood and obliterated, the difference), but rather in termsof their essential belonging together. The ontological difference thus prop-erly names the same belonging together that is referred to in terms of the“between” that holds open the structure of world.38 It is this same “differ-ence” that is referred to by Heidegger in his poem on Cézanne:

In the late work of the painter the twofoldnessof what is present and of presence has becomeone,“realised” and overcome at the same timetransformed into a mystery-filled identity.39

The attempt to articulate the place of being is itself an attempt to articulatewhat Cézanne paints: the differentiated unity that is the happening of worldin and through place.

The explicit focus on place—on topos, Da, Ort, Ortschaft—in Heidegger’slate thinking is thus not tied up with some romantic longing or nostalgiafor a “heimisch” origin. Instead, it follows from the topological character of


Heidegger’s thinking as a whole and is a direct consequence of the attemptto address the question of being in a way that remains to true to being assuch, but which is also true to the belonging together of being and beings,of presence and what is present. All of Heidegger’s thought, as he himselfsaid, can be construed as an attempt to articulate the place of being.40 Andin doing this, what Heidegger attempts is something that is difficult andeven obscure, largely because it is so fundamental, so simple and so close:“The one thing thinking would like to attain and for the first time tries toarticulate in Being and Time is something simple. As such, being remainsmysterious, the simple nearness of an unobtrusive prevailing.”41 And else-where he writes: “To think being does not require a solemn approach andthe pretension of arcane erudition, nor the display of rare and exceptionalstates as in mystical raptures, reveries and swoonings. All that is needed issimple wakefulness in the presence of any random unobtrusive being, anawakening that all of a sudden sees that the being ‘is.’”42 The homecomingthat Heidegger finds spoken of in Hölderlin is thus a homecoming that in-deed consists in a remembrance of and a return to a place that properly wecan never leave.43 Heidegger’s task of thinking is to achieve such a home-coming, a homecoming that must always be carried out in each and everyplace and time. We may choose to say that, for Heidegger, philosophy itselfis such a homecoming, but we may also wonder, as Heidegger did himself,whether it is proper to speak of this still as philosophy at all. Heidegger talksof thinking, a kind of meditative thinking, that looks to preserve the placeof being, to speak it, and in so doing provide us with a reminder of whoand what we are, of our own being as mortal creatures, born and destinedto die, and yet nevertheless given over to a world that itself shines, as Hei-degger puts it, as a world, as a world that shines in the truth and beauty ofgathered place.

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in this chapter I want to interrogate Heidegger’s commitment to a tran-scendental phenomenology during his so-called “phenomenological decade”(roughly 1919-29) in relation to Husserl’s parallel project of transcendental“first philosophy” in those same years. Husserl initially conceived of phe-nomenology in the Logical Investigations (Logische Untersuchungen) as “theoryof knowledge” (Erkenntnistheorie),1 but, in his mature transcendental periodthat began with Ideas I (Ideen I; 1913), he reconceived it as “first philosophy,”reviving Aristotle’s proté philosophia, without regard, as he put it, to the sedi-mented history of the phrase.2 By this “first philosophy” he did not meanmetaphysics or epistemology (neo-Kantianism had made epistemology the“first philosophy”), but rather “a philosophy of beginnings instituting itselfin the most radical philosophical self-consciousness.”3

In 1923, at the very time Husserl was lecturing on proté philosophia, Hei-degger began composing Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) as a contribution tophenomenological ontology, radically revising the Greek problematic of be-ing for the contemporary age.4 As is well known, despite their close personalcontacts, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s projects steadily grew apart in the mid-1920s.5 Nevertheless, there are strong links between these approaches to phi-losophy. Both emphasize the need to return to “concrete” experience, get-ting to the matters themselves. Both are interested in specifying conditionsof possibility. Both want to appeal to self-evidence. Both accept the possibil-ity of Wesensschau, not as a mystical practice but as attention to what is re-vealed in all revealing. Both want to anchor conceptuality in preconceptual

chapter

Heidegger’s Transcendental Phenomenology in the Light of

Husserl’s Project of First Philosophy

Dermot Moran

10

givenness, to do justice to the world as the backdrop and “horizon of valid-ity” for all experience. Both wanted to have genuine grounding as opposed tomerely apparent grounding. Both assume that there is an essence to philoso-phy itself and that its “primary establishment” (Urstiftung) in ancient Greececontinues to have significance if one peels back the sedimented history thathas accrued to it. Both are involved in a rethinking or deconstruction of thehistory of philosophy.

But, besides their parallel approaches to phenomenology, is there adeeper philosophical relationship between Husserl’s “first philosophy”—the“science of the all,” with its search for “ultimate foundation” (Letztbegrün-dung) through an account of the genesis and constitution of the “ultimatesense” (letzter Sinn), that is, the “sense of being” or “being-sense” (Seinssinn)and “validity of being” or “being-validity” (Seinsgeltung) of all entities—andHeidegger’s inquiry into the “meaning of Being” (Sinn von Sein)? To investi-gate this question, I shall proceed by tracing the parallels between the the-matics of these two thinkers in their lecture courses during that period, in-cluding their unsuccessful collaborative project on the article on “Phenom-enology” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.6

1.The Being-Question

According to Heidegger’s self-reflections, his entire life’s path in philosophywas motivated by the “Being-question” (die Seinsfrage),7 a question that alsocalls for reflection on the meaning of philosophy itself, provoking complexquestions about its historical achievement and essential possibility. Husserl,too, was interested in the meaning of philosophy, especially in the 1920s. HisErste Philosophie lecture course (1923–24) opens with an account of theGreek breakthrough to the universal and the ideal in Plato and then pro-ceeds with detailed analyses of the emergence of transcendental philosophyin Descartes, its naturalistic distortion with Locke, and the recovery of thetranscendental in Kant.

Husserl, of course, was intent on elaborating his phenomenology in tran-scendental terms, but he used several different modes of approach into thisdomain. He is best known for his “Cartesian way” of approaching transcen-dental phenomenology, portraying it as a radicalized exploration of the truemeaning of the Cartesian discovery of the ego cogito, especially in the perioddating from his 1922 London lectures to his 1929 Paris lectures. Meanwhile,Heidegger, at the same time, was intent precisely on deconstructing thatCartesian legacy, which he diagnosed as bearer of a deep metaphysical residuethat he initially located in the Latin transmission of Greek thought but laterfound at the heart of the Greek experience itself. However, as is now welldocumented, Husserl’s so-called Cartesianism was just one face of a many-

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sided approach. Equally important as the Cartesian way is the way of think-ing about the transcendental field by contrasting it with the psychologicaldomain. In fact, the difference between psychological and transcendentalsubjectivity is a theme that is common to both the Cartesian way and theway through psychology.

Heidegger, too, was struggling to express his own unique problematic ofthe meaning of being. In the lectures leading up to Being and Time, and inthat work itself, Heidegger remains within the framework of the Husserlianlegacy of transcendental philosophy, and develops his existential analytic ofDasein specifically within the tension between natural, mundanized subjec-tivity and transcendental subjectivity. Heidegger thought that Dasein cutacross that opposition and offered the beginnings of a solution to the tran-scendental problematic. Husserl, of course, regarded it as a collapse back intonaturalism and anthropologism. What I want to show in this chapter is that,whatever was the precise motivation for Heidegger’s long engagement withdie Seinsfrage, he could not have formulated his question without deep ab-sorption in the central problematic of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenol-ogy. Heidegger’s problem is not the legacy of the Greeks but the manner inwhich the meaning of everything that appears as such can have its site in afinite, temporal, mundanized existent, Dasein.

The origin of Heidegger’s being-question, at least in the manner in whichhe originally broached it in Being and Time, is to be found in Husserl. Fromthe outset of Husserl’s career he had been concerned with the conditionsthat make objective knowledge possible, and was precisely documenting thenature of objectivity in its many varieties, including real being, possible be-ing, and so on. He often speaks of the totality of all things as “being” of“the totality of what is” or “the being of the world,”8 and he speaks of hisproject as an attempt to understand the relation between consciousness andthe “all.”According to the Cartesian Meditations, phenomenology proposes tosolve the problem of objective being.9 The central claim of his transcenden-tal phenomenology was that every experience of beings is at the same timean experience of beings as appearing to and correlated with a constitutingsubjectivity, and that the objects that appear to consciousness are “achieve-ments,” “accomplishments,” or “performances” (Leistungen) of that con-sciousness. The nature of Husserl’s transcendental outlook is well expressedin the Crisis:

As scientists, can we content ourselves with the view that God created the worldand human beings within it? . . . The enigma of the creation and that of God him-self are essential component parts of positive religion. For the philosopher, however,this, and also the juxtaposition “subjectivity in the world as object” and at the sametime “conscious subject for the world” contain a necessary theoretical question, thatof understanding how this is possible.10

Heidegger’s Transcendental Phenomenology 137

It was that essential correlation between being and site of appearance of beingthat Heidegger inherited as his central problem. The question of being, as itis posed in Heidegger’s 1925 lecture series, History of the Concept of Time,which might be considered the “first draft” of Being and Time, emerges froma sustained and penetrating critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenome-nology.11 In particular, Heidegger makes problematic the being of Husserl’sconstituting subject. While acknowledging that Husserl was laudably tryingto develop a deeper account of subjectivity in his own Phenomenological Psy-chology lecture course of the same semester,12 which he sees as a Diltheyeanproject of reviving a personalistic psychology (History of the Concept of Time,§ 13), he then criticizes Husserl both for neglecting the being-question andeven for distorting the grounds that would make it possible to pose thatquestion in a radical way.

Heidegger detected in Husserl, especially in Ideas I, an unquestioned pre-sumption drawn from traditional philosophy, specifically, that there existedan essential distinction between material being and the being of conscious-ness, such that consciousness was “absolute being.”As he wrote in 1962:

Meanwhile “phenomenology” in Husserl’s sense was elaborated into a distinctivephilosophical position according to a pattern set by Descartes, Kant and Fichte. Thehistoricity of thought remained completely foreign to such a position. . . . The be-ing-question, unfolded in Being and Time, parted company with this philosophicalposition, and that on the basis of what to this day I still consider a more faithful ad-herence (Festhaltens) to the principle of phenomenology.13

Despite these emerging disagreements, Heidegger stresses, even as he offersa penetrating critique of Husserl, that “it almost goes without saying thateven today I still regard myself as a learner (als Lernender) in relation toHusserl.”14 Two years later in Being and Time he wrote:

The following investigation would not have been possible if the ground had notbeen prepared by Edmund Husserl, with whose Logical Investigations phenomenologyfirst emerged. Our comments on the preliminary conception of phenomenology haveshown that what is essential in it does not lie in its actuality as a philosophical move-ment. Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenologyonly by seizing upon it as a possibility.15

In his autobiographical essay “My Way to Phenomenology” Heideggerclaimed that what he gained from Husserl and from phenomenology wasthe practice of “phenomenological seeing.”16 Indeed, both in his explicitlyphenomenological decade and in his post-Kehre writings, Heidegger fre-quently explicates his philosophy as a genuine phenomenological seeing incontrast to other superficial conceptions of phenomenology that lay claimto “essential insight” without justification. Thus, in his “Letter to Richard-son” of 1962, Heidegger portrays himself as a phenomenologist.17 Similarly,

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in a letter to Eugen Fink in 1966, he says that phenomenology “does not re-fer to a particular direction of philosophy. It names a possibility that contin-ues to exist today, i.e., making it possible for thinking to attain the ‘thingsthemselves,’ or to put it more clearly, to attain the matter of thinking.”18 Ashe had written in 1959, “I was trying to think the nature of phenomenol-ogy in a more originary manner.”19

Heidegger struggled with Husserl’s phenomenological approach to beingright from the start. In the theology faculty of Freiburg University, whereHeidegger studied from 1909 to 1911, Husserl’s Logical Investigations lay onhis desk ever since his first semester there.20 Surely Husserl—a student ofBrentano—could shed light on the problem of the underlying unity of themanifold senses of being. Heidegger was drawn to Husserl’s endorsement ofthe objectivity of truth that seemed compatible with scholastic realism, andto the Sixth Logical Investigation with its discussion of categorial intuitionthat allowed the dimension of “supersensuous” being to appear. In Sixth In-vestigation, section 44, Husserl explains that the concept of being is not ar-rived at through reflection on the judgment but is given in the fulfillmentof the judgment itself:“the concept of Being can arise only when some be-ing, actual or imaginary, is set before our eyes,” and being set before our eyeshere involves an intuition broader than sensuous intuition (Sixth Logical In-vestigation, § 45). The message of the Sixth Investigation is that being ap-pears in a distinct kind of founded judgment.

Part of Heidegger’s fascination with the Investigations was that Husserlhad defended ideal truths, objective senses, and the direct intuitive grasp ofnonsensuous categorial entities. But Heidegger was also drawn to Husserl’sresolute antinaturalism. Husserl had already rejected psychologism, which inhis 1906–7 lecture course on he called the “original sin” of philosophy, the“sin against the Holy Spirit of philosophy.”21 Soon afterward, in Philosophyas a Rigorous Science (Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft; 1911) he was attack-ing the project of the naturalization of consciousness and naturalism in gen-eral. He now sought to construe the activity of constituting consciousnessin a nonpsychological, nonnaturalistic manner. Heidegger accepted this tran-scendental antinaturalistic orientation, but he actually thought Husserl re-tained a commitment to naturalism in his starting point, namely, the naturalattitude and its supposedly inherent assumption that humans were to be con-strued as rational animals (homo animal rationale). In Husserl’s stratification ofattitudes, according to Heidegger: “The fundamental stratum is still the natu-rally real (das Naturwirkliche) upon which the psychic is built, and upon thepsychic the spiritual.”22 Heidegger was never comfortable with Husserl’s re-tention of metaphysically loaded concepts of subject (the Latinized thinkingof to hypokeimenon) and consciousness, instead of attempting a more unprej-udiced description of the being that discloses beings in the being, namely


what he would call Dasein. Although, in his “On the Essence of Ground”(“Vom Wesen des Grundes”), Heidegger acknowledges:“If one chooses thetitle ‘subject’ for that being that we ourselves in each case are and that weunderstand as ‘Dasein’ then we may say that transcendence designates theessence of the subject, that it is the fundamental structure of subjectivity.”23

Being and Time would claim that phenomenology required that study of theintentional structures of consciousness needed to be replaced with the morefundamental study of the relation between Dasein and being itself. As Hei-degger later wrote: “What occurs for the phenomenology of the acts ofconsciousness as the self-manifestation of phenomena is thought more orig-inally by Aristotle and in all Greek thinking and existence as aletheia, as theunconcealedness of what is present, its being revealed, its showing itself.”24

We shall leave aside the Greek spin on phenomenology, to concentrate onthe manner in which Heidegger radicalizes transcendental phenomenology.

Heidegger still followed Husserl’s project of explicating the modes ofgivenness of objectivity in terms of a set of structured and gradated achieve-ments, but now the achievements are attributed to Dasein in its relation toworld. In Being and Time, he even endorses a kind of transcendental idealismas having an “advantage in principle” over realism:“If what the term ‘ideal-ism’ says, amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explainedby entities but is already that which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity, thenidealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problem-atic.”25 Of course, idealism is not usually construed as the thesis that beingis transcendental for every entity, and indeed Heidegger himself observesthat adopting this definition would mean that Aristotle, along with Kant,would be considered idealists. But the point, for Heidegger, is that the mean-ing of objective being lies beyond or behind those beings, transcendental tothem. This transcendental domain has been construed by idealists as “con-sciousness,” but this does not clarify the nature of the region in question.Dasein, on the other hand, with its intrinsic relation to being, offers a chancefor clarification.

Interestingly, Husserl himself, when he finally came to grips with Beingand Time, thought that the root of the disagreement between himself andHeidegger concerned the issue of transcendental philosophy. In his Amster-dam lecture of June 1931 he focuses precisely on the meaning of transcen-dental philosophy. He points out that the transcendental question can beposed in several ways:“It is the problem of cognition or of consciousness. Itis the problem of the possibility of objectively valid science. It is the prob-lem of the possibility of metaphysics—and so on.”26

But what concerns him in particular is the manner in which being getsrethought as certainty of being (a shift he attributes to Descartes). Transcen-dental self-reflection involves the new awareness that “a universal belief in

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being flows through and sustains my entire life.”27 This “constant certitudeof being” has up to that point sustained all scientific inquiry. However, thenew transcendental science must put this certitude under the epoché. Boththe whole world, the “totality of entities,” and myself as an individual hu-man being are put under suspension. The world becomes world-phenome-non, specifically a stream of experiences:“World in the sense of this univer-sal phenomenon of validity is obviously inseparable from transcendentalconsciousness.”28 Husserl was the first to articulate the importance of world-hood and the backdrop of horizons that make possible the subject’s acts ofmeaning-intending. The world transcends all experiences and makes thempossible and gives them validity by offering a backdrop for the harmoniouscourse of experience. To conceive of a transcendental ego is also always toconceive of a world correlated with it.

Heidegger’s discussion of the structures of worldhood, and especially thecorrelation between Dasein and world such that Dasein can be character-ized essentially as “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-Sein), is an essential de-velopment of the Husserlian theme, but it does so without putting theworld in brackets as world-phenomenon. Husserl would react to Heideg-ger’s move by calling it “anthropology,” suggesting he had fallen back intonaïveté by seeking to ground the world in a finite being who was part ofthat world, something his own transcendental philosophy had overcome.

Clearly, then, the nature of Heidegger’s transcendental phenomenologyof the 1920s needs to be explicated by careful comparison with Husserl’sproject in that very period. In order to make sense of the relation betweenHusserlian constitution of Seinssinn and Heideggerian Seinsfrage, I shall firstbriefly rehearse Husserl’s and Heidegger’s sense of their respective philo-sophical missions, and then examine some of their complex interactions inorder to situate Heidegger’s transcendental philosophy as an extension ofHusserl’s mature phenomenology.

2.The Task of Phenomenology

As Husserl makes clear in his Erste Philosophie lectures, the whole purpose ofphilosophy in its Socratic “primal instituting” (Urstiftung) is to achieve the ex-amined life, the life of Selbstbesinnung,29 which is also the life of complete“self-responsibility.” In his early Halle and Göttingen years Husserl spoke ofthis philosophical aim more narrowly as a phenomenological clarification ofthe conceptual elements, objects, and subjective performances that contributeto the theory and critique of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie and Erkenntniskri-tik) with regard to “fixing” the components of scientific knowledge. His aimwas to clarify the epistemology of the statements of scientific knowledge.How do they gain their sense? What grounds their validity? In particular, of


course, he was interested in grounding logical claims, but his overall aim wasa critique of science as such. But the initial investigations were primarily fo-cused on the nature of objectivity and the kind of warrant held by state-ments claiming to objective status.

Interestingly, Husserl’s analysis of the formal category of object as suchled him to develop formal ontology, a term inserted into the second editionof the Investigations to refer to the pure, a priori theory of the forms of ob-jects as such and their component parts (e.g., the very concepts of “part,”“whole,” “relation,” and so on that allow one to refer to objects at all).30

Husserl went on to contrast this formal ontology with the various materialor regional ontologies that dealt with specific objects (e.g., nature). Formalontology is always seen by Husserl as the counterpart of logic understood asassertive or apophantic. Formal ontology, however, does not deal with theexperience of being or with the fundamental correlation between conscious-ness and being; these themes belong to phenomenology, the investigation ofthe relation between consciousness and being. As Husserl explains in 1911:“If epistemology will nevertheless investigate the problems of the relation-ship between consciousness and being, it can have before its eyes only beingas the correlate of consciousness, as something ‘intended’ after the mannerof consciousness: as perceived, remembered, expected, represented pictori-ally, imagined, identified, distinguished, believed, opined, evaluated, etc.”31

Being is always “being-for” consciousness. Consciousness, on the otherhand, is “absolute being” (and Husserl never wavers from this position), as heput it in Ideas I.

Since all concepts have to be traced back to their origins in intuition,must the “sense of being” (Seinssinn) too be located in lived experience?Husserl locates the original sense of being in perceptual certainty. Being isgiven in perception as that which is itself there, with complete certainty. AsHusserl writes in his 1924 lecture on Kant:

[Perception] is what originally makes us conscious of the realities existing for us and“the” world as actually existing.To cancel out all such perception, actual and possible,means, for our total life of consciousness, to cancel out the world as objective sense(als gegenständlichen Sinn) and as validating actuality for us (als uns geltende Wirklichkeit);it means to remove from all world-thought (in every signification of this word) theoriginal basis of sense and legitimacy (den ursprünglichen Sinnes- und Rechtsboden).32

In other words, perception is what gives rise to the “being-sense” and theoriginal consciousness of validity. As he writes in his Passive and Active Syn-thesis lectures: “Every normal perception is a consciousness of validity.”33

Building on the primitive certainty or Urdoxa of sense perception, Husserlfinds more and more layers of being correlated with high-order cognitiveacts, including judgments.

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The radical doctrine of categorial intuition, which interested Heidegger somuch, claims that there are higher levels of givenness beyond the sensory. Be-ing and properties of the object are given in higher-order intuitions, foundedon the sensuous. As Heidegger himself explicates in his History of the Conceptof Time lectures:“Categorial acts are founded acts; in other words, everythingcategorial ultimately rests on sense intuition.”34 Heidegger comments that abroadened concept of the sensuous is at work here, such that spatiality, for in-stance, is sensuously apprehended, although not by means of “sense data.”Heidegger writes:“Sensuousness is a formal phenomenological concept and refers toall material content as it is already given by the subject matters themselves.”35

For Heidegger, Husserlian phenomenology provided a means for grasp-ing the revelation of being. Furthermore, constitution really meant letting-be-seen:“‘Constituting’ does not mean producing in the sense of making andfabricating; it means letting the entity be seen in its objectivity.”36 It is thetranscendental ego that constitutes sense and being, as Husserl put it in theCartesian Meditations:37 “Transcendence in every form is a within-the-ego,self-constituting being-sense [Transzendenz in jeder Form ist ein innerhalb desEgo sich konstituierender Seinssinn].”38

Husserl saw his program as tracing the layers of constituted meaning inall aspects of meaningful reality, including not just the actual but every pos-sible world insofar as every such world is correlated with a subjectivity andan actual or possible consciousness. Indeed, phenomenology, carried outwith systematic concreteness, is eo ipso transcendental idealism, albeit in afundamentally new sense. He adds that this idealism is not the product ofarguments against realism, but rather from close investigations of constitut-ing consciousness in all its possible modalities. Thus he asserts:“The proof ofthis idealism is therefore phenomenology itself. Only someone who misunder-stands either the deepest sense of intentional method, or that of transcen-dental reduction, or perhaps both, can attempt to separate phenomenologyfrom transcendental idealism.”39 Also in 1929 Husserl writes:“The whole ofphenomenology is nothing more than scientific self-examination on thepart of transcendental subjectivity.”40

Various claims have been made for how radically Husserl himself inter-prets the constitution of “sense and being” or “being-sense” by transcendentalsubjectivity. As Fink points out, he does on occasion speak of constitutionas creation. A. D. Smith has recently defended a particularly strong interpre-tation of this idealism.41 I also believe that Husserl intended it in a strongsense. There is no being, no reality, no world, other than those constitutedby transcendental subjectivity. To even think of an entity beyond conscious-ness is a countersense.

Of course, there are complicating factors in interpreting the meaning of thisidealism.42 Husserl explicitly rejected any solipsistic construal of his idealism,


and was emphatically neither a Berkeleyan nor a Kantian. His transcenden-tal ego has corporeality, is embodied in the world, is intersubjectively con-stituted, has practical motivations, and so on. Already, in 1925, he was stress-ing the complexity of the layered intersubjective life: “The task necessarilyarises of descriptively pursuing systematically coherent multiplicities of con-sciousness which pertain essentially to the cognitively becoming aware ofobjectivities of every category. Every category of possible objectivities des-ignates an index for a methodic regularity of possible psychic life; everypossible real world, a regularity of possible, intersubjective psychic life.”43

Husserl emphasized the intersubjective grounding of objectivity:“Transcen-dental intersubjectivity is the absolute and only self-sufficient foundation(Seinsboden), out of which everything objective (the totality of objectivelyreal entities, but also every objective ideal world) draws its sense and valid-ity.”44 Moreover, especially in the later work, as Dan Zahavi and NatalieDepraz have shown, the Husserlian subject is shot through with the non-egoic, with the “foreign,” das Ich-fremde, and so on.45 Just as temporal pres-ence involves and includes absence, and perception has a necessary absentelement, so also the ego implies the non-ego. These are difficult themes inthe later Husserl but they were already consistently to be found in his lec-tures and writings between 1915 and 1925, in his Freiburg period generally.

But in all his transcendental discussions, the key point for Husserl is toovercome naïveté and to gain (and sustain) the “absolute attitude” of thetranscendental onlooker. The transcendental attitude is to be contrastedwith the manner in which we normally live our lives “anonymously” in thenatural attitude:“The natural attitude is the form in which the total life ofhumanity is realized in running its natural, practical course. It was the onlyform from millennium to millennium, until out of science and philosophythere developed unique motivations for a revolution (Umwendung).”46

Husserl’s genius in part lay in identifying the kinds of attitude that illu-minate beings in their specific entitative and senseful status, that is, theirSeinssinn.The epoché and reduction are introduced in order to break the gripof the dominant natural attitude, entwined as it has been since the modernbreakthrough of Galileo with the mathematical scientific attitude, in orderto grasp the hidden constituting subjectivity at work. To every objectivitythere corresponds a set of constituting “acts” (not to be construed in an ac-tive sense) and indeed objectivities only come to light when approachedthrough a certain attitude. To being actual there corresponds the attitude ofcertainty, but there are other modalizations of attitudes that yield objectivi-ties under different modalities (possibility, dubitability, etc.). There are manykinds of attitude (Einstellung) but the most prominent are the natural atti-tude, the personalistic attitude (which humans take to each other and theirlocal and cultural world), the theoretical attitude, the attitude of the formal

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mathematicizing sciences, the aesthetic attitude, the religious attitude, and soon. An art object only comes to light as such under the aesthetic evaluatingattitude, and likewise a tool is only recognized as such under the practicalattitude.

With the gaining of the natural attitude, a whole new domain of experi-ence is opened up, and for the time a science of spirit can begin:

It is my conviction that intentional phenomenology has made of the spirit qua spiritfor the first time a field of systematic experience and science and has thus broughtabout the total reorientation (Umstellung) of the task of knowledge. The universalityof the absolute spirit surrounds everything that exists with an absolute historicity, towhich nature as a spiritual structure is subordinated. Intentional phenomenology,and specifically transcendental phenomenology, was first to see the light through itspoint of departure and its methods. Only through it do we understand, and fromthe most profound reasons, what naturalistic objectivism is and understand in par-ticular that psychology, because of its naturalism, has to miss entirely the accom-plishment, the radical and genuine problem of the life of the spirit.47

As Husserl was making these extraordinarily strong claims for phenomenol-ogy, Heidegger too was employing phenomenology to solve the centralphilosophical issue, the meaning of being.

3. Phenomenology and Ontology

Following his mentor Husserl, Heidegger too is “opposed to all free-floatingconstructions and accidental findings” and to all “pseudo-problems,” andwants to secure all claims in a certain kind of “self-evidence.”48 He followsthe phenomenological maxim “not to flee from the enigmatic character ofphenomena not to explain it away by a violent coup de main of a wild the-ory but rather to accentuate the puzzlement.”49 Furthermore, phenomenol-ogy is a method, and above all not a “standpoint.” In fact, as Heidegger putsit in his earliest Freiburg lecture course (1919), to think of phenomenologyas a standpoint is the “original sin” of philosophy.50 Heidegger too is con-cerned with what Husserl refers to as “the life of spirit” (Geistesleben) and hisearly Freiburg lecture courses extol the phenomenological virtue of “ab-solute sympathy with life,” allowing life to be seen and expressed philosoph-ically without distorting it.51

In Being and Time Heidegger seeks to reawaken the question of the mean-ing of being and to do so through a complex phenomenological approachthat identifies a particular being—Dasein—and then undertakes a twofoldinvestigation of it by means of an existential analytic of Dasein followed by arethinking of this with temporality in view. Moreover, phenomenology isthe name for the method of ontology (Basic Problems, § 5). Scientific ontologyis nothing but phenomenology, Heidegger says in History of Time lectures.52


“Phenomenology is always only the name for the procedure of ontology,”he says.53 In his 1927 lecture course Basic Problems of Phenomenology he asserts(and emphasizes that at the initial point it remains just an assertion) that“being is the sole and proper theme of philosophy” and hence that “philos-ophy is ontological”:“Philosophy is the theoretical interpretation of being,of being’s structure and its possibilities. Philosophy is ontological.”54 Philos-ophy is to be “universal phenomenological ontology,” and it is to be carriedout through a hermeneutic of Dasein, which provides the thread to leadphilosophical questioning out of the labyrinth.55

In Being and Time, section 7, Heidegger claims that his own use of theterm ontology is so “formally broad” there is no point in trying to trace itshistory: “Since the term ‘ontology’ is used in this investigation in a sensewhich is formally broad, any attempt to clarify the method of ontology bytracing its history is automatically ruled out.”56 He makes similar assertionsin The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: “we take this expression [ontology]in the widest possible sense” (§ 3, p. 11). Because it is new, it has no modelto follow:

When, moreover, we use the term “ontology”, we are not talking about some defi-nite philosophical discipline standing in interconnection with others. Here one doesnot have to measure up to the tasks of some discipline that has been presented be-forehand; on the contrary, only in terms of the objective necessities of definite ques-tions and the kind of treatment which the “things themselves” require, can one de-velop such a discipline.57

Ontology must emerge from the phenomenological situation and not byaping any of the existing sciences. Heidegger is claiming then that ontologyis a completely new science.

Heidegger’s 1925 lectures articulate his sense of phenomenology in quiteconsiderable detail. He discusses Husserl’s work at length—not just the Logi-cal Investigations, but also Ideas I, Philosophy as Rigorous Science, and even theunpublished discussions of the personalistic attitude of Ideas II. Heideggertraces a very powerful critique of Husserl in these pages, emphasizing theneed to inquire more deeply into the being of the subjective. Husserlian in-tentional description failed because it did not interrogate the sense of the be-ing of the subject and its intentional “acts,” and did not link the sense of thissubjectivity to transcendence and falling (Verfallen). In contrast to this ex-tended discussion, Being and Time does not mention intentionality, except in anote where Heidegger promises to show how intentionality is grounded inthe ec-static nature of Dasein.58

Heidegger in Being and Time stresses the importance of Dasein as being-in-the-world. Here he draws heavily on Husserl, who had an awareness of“world” from the beginning. In one sense it is the ultimate horizon, the

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whole of which everything else is a part (it has this meaning in the ThirdLogical Investigation). The world in the reduced sense as the world of ex-periences plays a central role in his transcendental phenomenology. Husserlsees all experience as presuming a world.

Let us consider for a moment Husserl’s analysis of world in his 1925 lec-tures published as Phenomenological Psychology, where world-experience andthe experienced world become themes for description.59 According toHusserl, there is always a “pregiven world” as the backdrop of experience.60

World is the “all-inclusive abiding ground of existence” and the “all-inclusivefield for all our activities.”61 It has its own universal, a priori, essential struc-ture,62 which includes the spatial and the temporal but also much more. Theworld is always experienced and it is experienced as “one and the sameworld.”63 It is grasped pre-theoretically and pre-predicatively. Assertions areabout it, and thus in a sense it precedes predicative truth. Truth in fact pre-supposes this world,64 which is given prior to our activities of questioning,judging, conceiving, theorizing.65 This world allows a “world truth” to besought.66 It is a world spread out before us and receding from us withoutend.67 A central—and essentially new—achievement of this work is its char-acterization of the Lebenswelt or life-world in which we find ourselves pri-marily and most of the time. It is precisely because the scientific worldviewhas been adopted as the only true worldview that the life-world has becomevisible for the first time. Moreover, this initial experiential world is not di-vided into nature and spirit. It is experienced as one totality. It is experi-enced through the harmonious flow of experiences confirming each other“continually progressing and concordant experience.”68

Heidegger takes over many aspects of this analysis and it would take toolong here to detail the relation between their respective concepts of world.Suffice to say, that Heidegger emphasizes more than Husserl the manner inwhich Dasein is always involved in falling, that is, being lost in the world.69

Whereas Husserl sees the understanding of world as giving a new security tothe sciences, Heidegger sees it as a way of entering into “existential” discus-sions concerning inauthentic and authentic ways of living as an individual inthe world, either caught in das Man or somehow authentically oneself.

Overall, however, in his 1925 lectures Heidegger sees Husserl as begin-ning from the natural attitude and thus already beginning from a standpointshot through with traditional metaphysical assumptions. For Heidegger,Husserl’s fault is to assume that, in the natural attitude, we “naturally” regardhumans as rational animals, as entities in the world. While he regardsHusserl’s development of the personalistic attitude as a positive improve-ment on this position, he sees Husserl as actually beginning from a distortedconception of the “natural attitude,” in fact from an overly naturalistic readingof the natural attitude. Heidegger’s move is to restore to the natural attitude


the thickness of its conceptions of human existing, everything that comesunder the title Dasein. Husserl falsely assumes that it is “natural” to think ofhuman nature as body and consciousness and so on. This is the Cartesianresidue in his thinking.The very starting point for his reorientation (Umstel-lung) remains uninterrogated.

As a result Heidegger thinks it is impossible for Husserl to recover thetrue sense of humanity in the transcendental attitude, since the transcenden-tal attitude alters the value of everything received in the natural attitude.Heidegger raises a question that he believes is characteristic of the Husser-lian project and yet unanswerable in it: “How is it at all possible that thissphere of absolute position, pure consciousness, which is supposed to beseparated from every transcendence by an absolute gulf, is at the same timeunited with reality in the unity of a real human being, who himself occursas a real object in the world?”70

Indeed, this precisely is Husserl’s central transcendental question in hismature years. As he himself asks in Crisis:

How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute thewhole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has alwaysalready become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal inter-connection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjectsappearing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the totalaccomplishment?71

Both Heidegger and Husserl wrestle with this question, which we mightcall the fundamental transcendental question. How can that which consti-tutes the whole be itself a constituted part of that very whole? Husserl seesthis as a paradox, but resolves it in terms of two different attitudes—the atti-tude of “common sense” (he uses the English term), and the attitude of the“disinterested spectator.”72 The way to grasp the question is to apply theepoché and reduction, and to remain within them, as Husserl emphasizes inhis Amsterdam lectures.

Heidegger’s response to this problematic, on the other hand, is to raise thebeing-question. Heidegger explicates this paradox in terms of Dasein, whichboth manifests being and is also a being.The distinction then is between be-ings and being, for Heidegger, between the “ontic” domain of beings and theontological (in Heidegger’s new sense) domain of Sein, the to-be, the “how” ofbeings. This “how” had been thought by Husserl as the modes of givennessto constituting subjectivity. Heidegger too starts from this standpoint (in1925) but soon goes beyond it.

In attempting to address the central paradox of transcendental phenome-nology, Husserl was only too aware that he might be heading into the phe-nomenological equivalent of the medieval theological absurdity of the two

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kinds of truth. He refers in Crisis to the notorious doctrine of “doubletruth.”73 But, for Husserl, the problem is in fact resolved by the distinctionbetween two attitudes—the natural and the transcendental. Objective truthas such is found only in the natural attitude:“Objective truth belongs exclu-sively within the attitude of natural human world-life.”74

Truth, for Husserl, emerges as a practical concern within the world forsecuring the attitude of certainty against its possible modalizations (into un-belief, etc.). All sciences deal with the objective world and hence are naïveabout the productions of transcendental subjectivity. When the subjectivecorrelations are exhibited in the transcendental attitude, we are no longer inthe domain of objective truth.

In the reorientation of the epoché nothing is lost, none of the interestsand ends of world-life, and thus also none of the ends of knowledge. Butthe essential subjective correlates of all these things are exhibited, and thusthe full and true ontic meaning of objective being, and thus of all objectivetruth, is set forth.75

Husserl emphasizes the need to live in the natural attitude in order tomake possible the break from it in the transcendental attitude that will graspintentional life as “accomplishing life” (als leistendes).76 This is precisely whatHeidegger seizes on to criticize. If the natural attitude is treated as the out-look of modern philosophy then we have imported prejudices into our dis-cussion. Phenomenology has become unphenomenological, as he will re-peatedly say.

The struggles between the competing Husserlian and Heideggerian inter-pretations of the task of “first philosophy” are nowhere more evident than inthe differences between the drafts of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article andin the notes Husserl made in his personal copy of Being and Time.77 Both setsof documents reveal a perplexity on the side of Husserl as to what Heideg-ger meant by fundamental ontology.Where Heidegger speaks of the inquiryinto the meaning of being as the most basic and concrete of questions,Husserl agrees, but he comments in the margin that this is a “transcendental-phenomenological question” about the constitutive meaning of being.

In his note at the bottom of Being and Time, section 3, Husserl explainsthat all entities have certain formal ontological properties in common andthat every individual being is a concretization of these forms. Husserl isclearly invoking his distinction between formal and material ontologies. Inso as there are categories (unity, part/whole, identity, individual, species) thatbelong to any thing insofar as it is a thing, then these topics belong to for-mal ontology.

Husserl could only see in Heidegger’s transcendental analytic of Daseinan account of human existence in the natural attitude and hence a kind ofanthropology. Husserl, however, never does resolve how human beings as


entities in the world are at the same time world-constituting. How can thetranscendental ego (belonging to no matter what kind of intersubjectivecommunity) be mundanized, incarnated, temporalized? Are we not left inHusserl with a “double truth”? Husserl is protected from the consequencesof this problem by the epoché that separates Seinssinn from existence (Daseinin Husserl’s sense). Heidegger, on the other hand, by making historically ex-istent Dasein both a transcendental condition for world and at the sametime mediating the meaning of being, thinks, at least in Being and Time, thathe has found a way of solving the transcendental problem. That he wouldsoon be forced to abandon the language of transcendental philosophy andseek an “other thinking that abandons subjectivity” is another story.78

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in two recent articles, I argued that one of the early Heidegger’s most sig-nificant contributions to transcendental philosophy involved a major rethink-ing of the nature of self-consciousness.1 “Transcendental self-consciousness”is always understood by Kant to involve a conceptual representation of theact in which a subject conceptually represents an object. Heidegger, on theother hand, argues that, while “the self which the Dasein is, is there some-how in and along with all intentional comportments,” the intention di-rected toward the self is not properly seen as either a representation or asconceptual. Rather, Heidegger suggests, “we understand ourselves and ourexistence by way of the activities we pursue and the things we take careof.”2 The self is primarily tacitly intended as that “for the sake of which”things matter to us and our activities make sense. For Heidegger, it is onlyinsofar as our interactions with things are implicitly organized in terms of astyle of life embodied in such a “for-the-sake-of” that we are capable of us-ing concepts to make judgments concerning objects, or to cognize ourselvesas the subject of our experiences.

If, as I have previously argued, Heidegger systematically rethinks the na-ture of the “I think,” this suggests that he must also have rethought the roleof the “I think” in transcendental arguments. For Kant, the ability to attachthe “I think” to all of my representations is tied up with the ability to formjudgments, and this ability in turn is essential for the ability to cognize ob-jects independent of our apprehensions of them, and the capacity to form acoherent, unified experience of an objective world. But Heidegger thinksthat it is a mistake to think of the basic form of our self-apprehension interms of a conceptual representation accompanying our other representationsand to think of the activity of judging as the most basic human intentional

chapter

The “I Think” and the For-the-Sake-of-Which

Mark Okrent

11

comportment. Instead, he suggests that there is a self-understanding involvedin a distinctively human type of overt, practical activity that is a necessarycondition for both the use of concepts in a judgment and the capacity tothink the “I think.” In this chapter, I discuss the way in which Heidegger con-structs a transcendental argument that, first, links practical self-understandingin a “for-the-sake-of” with the ability to intend entities as entities by engag-ing in certain distinctively human activities, and, second, treats both of theseas conditions on the ability to judge and on the capacity to understand one-self in explicitly conceptual terms. Before doing this I briefly summarize therole that Kant gives to the “I think” in his transcendental arguments.

1. Kant on Judgment and the “I Think”

For Kant,“It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my represen-tations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which couldnot be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representationwould be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.”3 This assertion,while pithy and memorable, is also unfortunately written in such a way thatit is easy to misinterpret. Kant clearly is committed by this statement to theview that the possibility of the “I think” accompanying some representationis necessary for the possibility of that representation being thought as therepresentation of something. This is what the crucial second clause asserts.It is possible to think of some representation as representing some thingonly if it is possible for the “I think” to accompany this representation. Butdoes this imply that for x to be a representation of some thing it must bepossible for the “I think” to accompany it? That of course depends uponwhether or not the possibility of x being thought as a representation of z isessential to x being a representation of z. And this seems to be the importof Kant’s third clause, where he says that to say that “something representedin me could not be thought” is equivalent to saying that “the representationis impossible.” But then he apparently takes this equivalence back in the fi-nal, parenthetical clause. According to this final parenthesis, the assertion“representation x cannot be thought by me as representing z, because I cannot affix the ‘I think’ to it,” is not equivalent to “x representing z is impossible,because I can not affix the ‘I think’ to it,” but, rather, to “it (x?, z?) would benothing to me if I could not affix the ‘I think’ to it.”And this is clearly a dif-ferent claim than the stronger claim, seemingly asserted in the second clause,that no object can be represented without the possibility of the “I think.” Butwhich of these is Kant’s considered opinion on the status and role of the “Ithink”?

There is excellent reason to believe that the final parenthetical clausegoverns the whole and that Kant does not equate x being a representation

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of z with the possibility of x being “thought” by me as a representation ofz. Indeed, Kant is quite clear, both in the Critique and elsewhere, that he be-lieves that it is possible for there to be a representation of z in me of whichI am not even conscious, let alone capable of thinking. In the division oftypes of representations in the Dialectic, for example, Kant distinguishes be-tween the genus “representation” and its species, perceptio, or “representationwith consciousness.”4 More importantly, in the Jäsche Lectures on Logic Kantcontinues the division by distinguishing between two forms of perceptio: tobe acquainted (kennen) with something,“or to represent something in com-parison with other things, both as to sameness and as to difference,” and tobe acquainted with something with consciousness, or cognition (erkennen). Bothof these, Kant tells us, involve intentions directed toward objects, but animalsare only acquainted with objects, they do not cognize them. “Animals areacquainted with objects too, but they do not cognize them.”5 It is only in thenext division that Kant reaches understanding,“to cognize something throughthe understanding by means of concepts, or to conceive.” So, for Kant in1800 (the date of the Jäsche Logic), it is possible for an agent to have a repre-sentation of something, be conscious of that representation, and even repre-sent that representation in relation to others in respect to sameness and dif-ference, and thus be acquainted with objects, without that agent using con-cepts or being conscious that they are acquainted with objects. And, since inthe Jäsche Logic Kant uses “to think” as equivalent with “to cognize withconcepts,”6 it is obvious that when he says in the B-Deduction that if it wereimpossible for the “I think” to accompany a representation x, then x couldnot be thought by me, this can’t be equivalent to saying that if it were impos-sible for the “I think” to accompany x, it would be impossible for x to be arepresentation of z. For Kant, the possibility of the “I think” is not a neces-sary condition for representation, or even for acquaintance with objects. If itwere, animals could not be acquainted with objects, and, according to theKant of the late critical period, animals are acquainted with objects.

For what, then, is the “I think” necessary? For Kant, it is primarily nec-essary for two things, both of which are mentioned in the famous statementquoted above: “thinking” a representation as a representation of an object;and a representation, and the object represented by that representation, be-ing something “to” me. But how are we to interpret these?

What does Kant mean when he talks about “something represented in mewhich is thought”? One of the keys to interpreting this possibility is given inKant’s division of representations in the Lectures on Logic. He tells us therethat animals, who are incapable of having the “I think” accompany their rep-resentations, can be acquainted with objects perceptually, and even representsimilarities and differences, but they can’t cognize objects. To be acquaintedwith something is to “represent something in comparison with other things,

The “I Think” and the For-the-Sake-of-Which 153

both as to sameness and as to difference.” Cognition, on the other hand,Kant says, is being acquainted with something with consciousness. The ac-quaintance side of this division is clear enough. When one is acquaintedwith an object one represents that object as similar to and different fromother objects. When my dog Mac sees other dogs he reacts in similar fash-ion to all of them but differently in each of those cases than he does whenhe sees a squirrel. And this gives us reason to believe not only that his repre-sentations of the dogs are similar to one another and different from his rep-resentations of squirrels, but also that in some sense Mac synthesizes theserepresentations and compares them in regard to their similarities and differ-ences. In Kant’s terms, Mac represents the dogs in comparison with thesquirrels in respect to sameness and difference. But what, then, does cogni-tion, of which Mac is incapable, add? Kant says that cognition is acquain-tance with consciousness. And at first sight this is odd, because an act inwhich one is acquainted with an object, such as Mac perceiving the differ-ence between a dog and a squirrel, is already itself a conscious representa-tion for Kant. So what can he mean when he says that cognition is beingacquainted with something with consciousness?

Although it is not the case that for Kant all conscious states are inten-tional (he does not appear to take feelings, for example, to be intentional),he does treat many conscious states as having an intentional component. Inthe division of kinds of representations in the Jäsche Logic, for example, hesays that the division is “in regard to the objective content” of these repre-sentations. That is, acquaintance is different from cognition, and simple per-ceptual cognition is different from a conceptual cognitive understanding, inrespect to what is represented in these various states. From this perspective,when Kant speaks of cognition as acquaintance with consciousness (his empha-sis), what is differentially conscious in cognitive states is not the state itself,(both acts of cognition and acts of acquaintance are conscious states), butrather the content of those states.That is, Kant is suggesting that the differentiaof cognitive acts is that the acts of acquaintance in which the sameness anddifference of objects is represented are themselves consciously represented incognitive acts. So, to return to Mac, he represents dogs and squirrels differ-ently (if he didn’t he wouldn’t be a very successful animal), and he can evendistinguish between them when instances of both are present.That is, he canrepresent something in comparison with other things, both as to samenessand as to difference. But he does not represent that sameness and differenceitself as such. That is, Mac is incapable of intending that he represents dogsand squirrels differently, and that these representations differ from one an-other in such and such respects. It is for this reason that Mac is incapable ofusing concepts, and also for this reason that Kant tells us that understanding,or the ability to conceive through concepts, is a type of cognition. To have

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the concept “dog,” is at least to be potentially conscious of those respects inwhich representations of all dogs are similar and the respects in which therepresentations of all dogs are different from the representations of nondogs.

The distinguishing feature of human representation is not introduced inthe Transcendental Deduction through a contrast with animal representa-tion, as it is in the Lectures on Logic. Nevertheless, the same differentia is sug-gested there as in the Logic. The B-Deduction begins with the suggestionthat the distinguishing “act of spontaneity” of the faculty of the understand-ing, an act which has “the general title ‘synthesis,’” is “the combination of amanifold in general.”7 This way of putting the matter makes it sound as ifwhat is at issue is the act itself of combining or putting together representa-tions. On this reading, however, the act in which my dog combines his rep-resentations of another dog and a squirrel in order to compare them wouldcount as an act of understanding, and this can’t be right. Fortunately, Kantimmediately corrects this misleading impression. For he tells us, first, that itis not the mere combination of representations which is the act of under-standing, but the representation of the combination, and, second, that what iscontained in combination is not merely a manifold and its synthesis, but alsothe representation of the unity of the combination or synthesis of a manifold:“of all representations combination is the only one which cannot be giventhrough objects.” “But the concept of combination includes, besides theconcept of the manifold and of its synthesis, also the concept of the unityof the manifold. Combination is the representation of the synthetic unity ofthe manifold. The representation of this unity cannot, therefore, arise out ofthe combination. On the contrary, it is what, by adding itself to the repre-sentation of the manifold, first makes possible the concept of the combina-tion.”8 That is, the understanding combines a manifold in the sense that itrepresents the manifold as unified in a single representation; it represents theunity of what is manifold. Each of our representations of dogs is itself a syn-thesis or combination of a manifold of different representations. My dog,Mac, insofar as he is acquainted with objects, can have such synthetic repre-sentations. Indeed, he can represent two representations of dogs togetherand note their similarity. But he cannot represent that similarity of repre-sentation itself in a single representation by recognizing that both of thesesynthetic representations have been synthesized in the same way and thatthey are both instances of the same type of representation,“dog.”The repre-sentation in which we recognize that Mac is similar to Fido and all otherdogs in respect of being a dog is of course the judgment that Mac is a dog.It is for this reason that in the Logic Kant explicitly asserts that the distin-guishing mark of human cognition is that it is discursive.

It is important to note that for Kant cognition involves two representa-tions that are, in principle, separate and distinct. First, there is no cognition


without acquaintance: every cognitive act takes as its object a representationwhich itself is a synthesis or combination of a variety of other representa-tions. Kant tells us that this is a representation of a type that a mere animalcan have. But second, for cognition of a human kind to occur, there mustbe a second act that involves a second representation: an act in which werepresent the unitary character of the act of combination in which we gen-erate the first representation. That is, cognition is acquaintance togetherwith consciousness of the unity of the synthesis of that with which we areacquainted.

In both the A-Deduction and the B-Deduction Kant immediately fol-lows his discussions of the consciousness of the unity of synthesis with thefirst introduction of the necessity of the unity of apperception. This “Ithink,” which must be capable of accompanying all of my cognitive repre-sentations, is itself, for Kant, a representation, a representation which em-bodies a consciousness of the unity of the synthesis of all that is manifold inmy experience. “The synthetic proposition, that all the variety of empiricalconsciousness must be combined in one single self-consciousness, is the ab-solutely first and synthetic principle of our thought in general. But it mustnot be forgotten that the bare representation ‘I’ in relation to all other repre-sentations (the collective unity of which it makes possible) is transcendentalconsciousness.”9 Indeed, this “I think” is a specific kind of representation, a“thought.”“On the other hand, in the transcendental synthesis of the mani-fold of representations in general, and therefore in the synthetic originalunity of apperception, I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself,nor as I am in myself, but only that I am.This representation is a thought, notan intuition.”10 What I am conscious of in this thought, this “bare representa-tion ‘I,’” is the “unity of synthesis,” or combination, of my various represen-tations. Putting this all together, the “I,” which must be capable of accompa-nying all of my representations, is the representation of the unitary act ofthinking that relates all of my various representations into a single conscious-ness or experience.

Kant’s line of argument here seems to be as follows. What is distinctiveabout human cognition is the ability to represent or be conscious of theunifying or combining character of our own mental activity in a single uni-fying representation.Typically, such a representation itself ultimately involvesa concept applied in a judgment to a synthesized manifold; for example,“That is a dog.”When one represents in this way, what is represented is thetype of synthesizing character of one’s own activity. As such, every such rep-resenting act, no matter what concept is applied, is also an act of self-repre-senting, an act in which one conceptually represents one’s own combiningactivity. Since it is the synthetic representation of that dog that is conceptu-ally characterized as “dog,” and that representation has that character partly

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in virtue of the character of the synthesizing activity that constituted thatcomplex representation, it is one’s own activity that one types when onetypes a representation as one of a dog. So to be capable of conceptuallycognizing something as a dog, one must be capable of conceptually cogniz-ing one’s dog representations as one’s own representations, in the sense thatthey are recognized as the product of a certain sort of combining activityon my part. What I have that my dog, Mac, lacks is precisely this ability tobe acquainted with objects with consciousness, that is, the reflective capacityto cognize and type my own acts. That which all such acts of combinationshare in common is just that they are all my acts. But insofar as I can cog-nize conceptually I have the reflective capacity to type my own acts, so Ihave the ability to conceptually represent, to think, my own acts as my ownacts. That is, I can conceptually cognize, or think, an object only if thethought “I think” can accompany the act in which I think the object. ForKant, what the “I think” is necessary for is the capacity to judge and to con-ceptually represent objects by forming discursive judgments about them.

At the same time the possibility of the “I think” is also required if anyrepresentation or object is to be anything “to me.” Something is something“to me” only if it is recognizable by me as something which I am cogniz-ing.That is, for a dog to be something to me I must be able to represent thatthe dog is being thought by me as a dog. But this possibility just is the pos-sibility of representing the act in which I intend the dog as my act, that is,the possibility of the “I think” accompanying the cognition of the dog asdog. It is thus analytically true that some thing can be something to meonly if I am capable of affixing the “I think” to its representation.

2. Self-Intention in Heidegger

The structure of Kant’s argument turns on his analysis of the distinctive fea-ture of human mental life. Kant holds that we differ from the other animalsin our capacity to cognize objects, rather than merely being perceptually ac-quainted with them. This cognitive capacity is interpreted by Kant as thehuman ability to represent the character of our own mental activity, and thisroot mental activity in turn is understood as the activity of combining orsynthesizing our representations in ways that accord with certain rules orinstantiate certain patterns. This synthesis itself, “is the mere result of thepower of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul.”11 Hu-mans, through our capacity to represent this activity according to its type, or“to bring this synthesis to concepts,” are capable of discursive thought, judg-ment, and logical inference. Since my abilities in these areas are all rooted inmy ability to represent the character of my own cognitive activity, and thecommon feature of all of that activity is that it is my activity, if I am capable


of cognition, in Kant’s technical sense, then I am also capable of represent-ing my representations as my representations. That is, a necessary conditionon human cognition is our capacity to characterize each of our thoughts asour thoughts.

What does Heidegger think about all of this? How, specifically, does theconceptual cognition of the “I think” enter into Heidegger’s transcendentaldiscussions of intentionality? The quick answer to this question is: notmuch. Heidegger of course accepts that we have the capacity to conceptu-ally intend each of our cognitive acts of recognition or judgment as ourown. He is even willing to go further than Kant and to generalize to non-judgmental, noncognitive acts the formal requirement that all intentionalacts directed toward something by a Daseinish intentional agent involve anintention directed toward itself by that agent. (“Formally, it is unassailable tospeak of the ego as consciousness of something that is at the same timeconscious of itself. . . . To intentionality belongs, not only a self-directing-toward and not only an understanding of the being of the being towardwhich it is directed, but also the associated unveiling of the self which iscomporting itself here.”)12 But at the same time that he asserts the necessityof such self-directed intentionality, he also radically rethinks the character ofthat self-directedness.

The “I think” that concerns Kant is at once a condition on conceptualrepresentation and itself a conceptual representation, or thought. In Kant,the “I think” is tied up with our ability to reflect and make conceptuallypresent to ourselves the nature of our own cognitive activity. While Hei-degger doesn’t for a moment doubt that such reflective cognitive intentionsare possible, he isn’t much interested in them. He isn’t interested in theKantian “I think” because he believes that such reflective conceptual inten-tions are derivative from a more basic type of self-disclosure, a kind of self-disclosure which itself is a necessary condition on a more basic kind of in-tentionality than that embodied in discursive, judgmental thought: “TheDasein, as existing, is there for itself, even when the ego does not direct itselfto itself in the manner of its own peculiar turning around and turning back,which in phenomenology is called inner perception as contrasted withouter. The self is there for the Dasein itself without reflection and withoutinner perception, before all reflection.”13

Just as in Kant the conceptual character of the “I think” is tied up withthe cognitive nature of the intentionality for which it is necessary, the char-acter of this nonreflective, noncognitive (in Kant’s sense), more basic type ofHeideggerian self-directed intention is tied up with the distinctive kind ofintentionality for which it is supposed to be necessary. In attempting to de-scribe the character of this nonreflective self-intention, Heidegger appeals toa description of the way in which we intend entities when we pursue ends

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and care for and about things. Dasein, he tells us, “never finds itself other-wise than in the things themselves, and in fact in those things that daily sur-round it. It finds itself primarily and constantly in things because, tendingthem, distressed by them, it always in some way or other rests in things.Each of us is what he pursues and cares for. In everyday terms, we under-stand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and thethings we take care of. We understand ourselves by starting from them be-cause the Dasein finds itself primarily in things.”14

On its surface, this quotation asserts that the primary form of self-directedintentionality is wrapped up in our abilities to “tend” entities, or be dis-tressed by them, or take care of them. There is no doubt, of course, that weintend an entity when we tend it or take care of it. I can only “take care” ofmy computer or be distressed by my fungus-ridden peach tree insofar as Iam capable of intending or being directed toward the computer or the tree.Indeed, I can only be engaged with these things in these ways if I intend thecomputer as a computer or the tree as a tree. My distress for the tree pre-supposes that I take the tree to be diseased, that is, as a tree of a certain sortthat is failing to satisfy the norms appropriate to that sort. And I can care forthe computer only if I take it to be a computer. But these truisms lead totwo puzzles. First, just how is a self-directed intention involved in these inten-tional comportments? And second, given that being distressed by a tree ortaking care of a computer seem to involve treating the tree as a tree and thecomputer as a computer, why does Heidegger think that such intentionalacts are nonreflective, or noncognitions, in Kant’s sense? We will approach theanswer to the first question by considering the second.

We can begin to answer this question if we remind ourselves that even inKant it is not quite true that the ability to intend a tree as a tree, or a dog as adog, depends upon the intentional capacity to judge that the tree is a tree byforming a conceptual representation of a tree. For Kant, animals, such as mydog, Mac, can be acquainted with trees as trees and dogs as dogs in the sensethat they can compare these objects in respect to similarity and difference,even though they are incapable of conceptually recognizing and judging thatsome tree is a tree, that is, that it conforms to the concept of a tree. It is onlybecause Mac, and we, have an imagination that has the blind power of repre-senting dogs according to the schema of doghood that we, but not Mac, canrecognize that we are intending dogs as dogs. So, perhaps surprisingly, whenHeidegger in this passage suggests that there is a precognitive, prejudgmentalability to intend entities as belonging to kinds, for example in being distressedby things or taking care of them, his assertion is simply orthodox Kant.

Heidegger is also an orthodox Kantian in a second important respect. Kant,and Heidegger, believe that there is a significant intentional divide betweenanimals and humans, although they locate this divide in different distinctions.


For Kant, as we have seen, it doesn’t follow from the fact that Mac can in-tend another dog in a doggy way that Mac can recognize that what he isdoing is intending a dog as a dog. And failing that ability, Mac can never berational and think, or act, out of a recognition of principle. Heidegger, ofcourse, also denies animals these Kantian, rational capacities. But, impor-tantly, he also denies them a second, prior, intentional capacity, of whichKant does not speak. Humans, who are Dasein, are in such a way as to be“in a world.” Animals, at most, are “world poor.”What capacity for inten-tional content does “being-in-the-world” track?

According to a familiar list, Heidegger says that beings who are in theworld are capable of the following intentional comportments, and entitiesthat are not in-the-world, such as animals, are not capable of these kinds ofcomportments: “Working on something with something, producing some-thing, cultivating and caring for something, putting something to use, em-ploying something for something.”15 Notice two things about this list. First,all of these intentional comportments are practical rather than judgmentalor cognitive. When one produces something, or cultivates and cares forsomething, or employs something for something, one engages in an overtpractical activity that has some teleological point. Second, included in thislist of practical intentional comportments is “cultivating and caring forsomething,” and “caring for something” is precisely what, in another con-text, Heidegger specifies as the locus of human self-directed intentionality.“Each of us is what he pursues and cares for. In everyday terms, we under-stand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and thethings we take care of.”

In what sense are these kinds of overt practical intentional performancescharacteristic of human intentionality? Surely animals are capable of actingin order to achieve practical ends, aren’t they? Well, yes and no. They are, ofcourse, capable of acting so as to attain ends that they require in order tostay alive. But most animals are surely incapable of the specific kinds of prac-tical intentional performances which are included in Heidegger’s list of themodes of “being-in.” I cultivate and care for my peach tree; my dog, Mac, isincapable of such action. I work on my garden with a shovel; Mac is inca-pable of doing so. I employ alcohol for disinfecting the saw I use to prunemy diseased tree; Mac cannot employ something for something. All of thesevarieties of practical comportment essentially involve a particular way of in-teracting with objects. In each of these activities both the objects which weuse and the objects which we use them on seem to be typed in a determi-nate way. In each of these cases the overt, practical, intentional activity tac-itly involves intending an entity or entities as fulfilling or potentially fulfill-ing some job classification or other, as “in order to” satisfy some instrumen-tal role. One can’t employ alcohol for disinfecting unless one can intend

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something as a disinfectant, that is, as an entity to be used in order to killfungus on a tool or organism. One can’t cultivate and care for a peach treeunless one intends the seedling to be cultivated into a fruit-bearing tree, thatis, as something for producing, or in order to produce, fruit. I can’t use thisentity as a tool which is a shovel unless I can intend it as to be used in orderto accomplish a certain kind of task, the task of digging holes in the ground.

So, for Heidegger, insofar as Dasein is being in the world, Dasein is capa-ble of certain types of overt intentional performances, such as cultivatingand caring for something, or employing something for something, and thesetypes of performances all involve intending something as “in order to” fulfillsome job classification or other. To intend something as “in order to” satisfysome job classification is, for Heidegger, just to intend it as a piece of equip-ment or as ready-to-hand.16 Heidegger thinks, wrongly as it turns out, thatonly humans can intend the ready-to-hand as ready-to-hand. But, formally,it is a necessary condition on the possibility of an entity being Dasein that itis always intending entities as ready-to-hand. “Dasein always assigns itselffrom a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ to the ‘with-which’ of an involvement; that isto say, to the extent that it is, it always lets entities be encountered as ready-to-hand.”17

This ability to intend things as belonging to or adhering to equipmentaltypes, as ready-to-hand, provides the base step for all of Heidegger’s tran-scendental arguments. Just as Kant raises the question of what else we mustintend and in what other ways must we be capable of intending if we are tobe able to intend entities by conceptually cognizing them in judgment,Heidegger raises the question of what else and in what other ways we mustbe capable of intending if we are to be able to intend entities as ready-to-hand. And, just as Kant in turn argues that the ability to conceptually cog-nize objects in judgments is necessary for the ability to intend a single uni-fied world of possible experience or empirical knowledge, Heidegger arguesthat the ability to intend entities as ready-to-hand is necessary for a varietyof other kinds of intentional comportments. Most notably, he argues thatthe ability to intend entities as equipment, together with all of the othertypes of intentional comportments that are implicated in this intentional ac-complishment, are necessary for the possibility of those types of intentionswhich Kant associates with the ability to reflectively cognize. In the remain-der of this chapter I will briefly lay out the overall structure of Heidegger’stranscendental argument, paying special attention to the role and nature ofHeidegger’s replacement for transcendental apperception, the “for-the-sake-of-which.”

Heidegger asserts that there are three salient necessary conditions on in-tending a tool as a tool. That is, he holds that any agent that can intend atool as a tool must also intend in these other ways. In the order I will treat


them here these conditions are: (1) One can not intend anything as belong-ing to an in-order-to type unless one also intends other entities as belongingto other in-order-to types. (2) One can not intend anything as belonging toan “in-order-to” type unless one also intends what it is for something to be-long to some in-order-to type. (3) One can not intend anything as belong-ing to an “in-order-to” type unless one also intends oneself as “that for thesake of which” one engages in the activity in which one engages. This last,self-directed, type of intention plays the same structural role in Heidegger’sthought that the “I think” does in Kant.

First, Heidegger holds that all intentions directed toward the ready-to-hand as ready-to-hand are holistic. One cannot intend anything as belong-ing to an in-order-to type unless one also intends other entities as belongingto other in-order-to types. “Taken strictly, there is no such thing as an equip-ment. To the being of any equipment there always belongs a totality ofequipment, in which it can be the equipment it is. . . . Equipment—in ac-cordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of [aus] its belonging toother equipment.”18 That is, Heidegger holds that when I reach for my alco-hol in order to disinfect the blade of my saw so that I don’t infect other partsof the peach tree or other trees, by the very nature of the case that very actinvolves not merely intending the alcohol as a disinfectant but also involvesintending the saw as an instrument for pruning, the rag as an instrument forwiping, the tree as in order to bear fruit, and so on. His reasons for assertingthis have to do with the overtly teleological character of the order of the“in-order-to” and the fact that all teleological determinations are holistic injust this way. What something is in order to accomplish is something that it-self is only determinate in terms of other in-order-to roles.

Heidegger also holds that (2) one intends any entity as in-order-to only ifone also intends what it is for something to belong to some in-order-to type.

Whenever we let there be an involvement with something in something before-hand, our doing so is grounded in our understanding such things as letting some-thing be involved, and such things as the “with-which” and “in-which” of involve-ments. Anything of this sort, and anything else that is basic for it, such as the “to-wards-this” as that in which there is an involvement, or such as the“for-the-sake-of-which” to which every “towards-which” ultimately goes back—allof these must be disclosed beforehand with a certain intelligibility.19

That is, Heidegger asserts that when we, say, employ the alcohol as a disinfec-tant, we must in some sense intend not merely the alcohol, but also what it isfor something to be properly employed to achieve some specified end. And,since to tacitly intend this one must also have some tacit understanding ofthe form of the holistic structures in terms of which anything can be in-order-to, in intending the alcohol as disinfectant I am also intending “world,”

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or “that wherein Dasein understands itself beforehand in the mode of assign-ing itself.”20

Heidegger insists, explicitly and often, on the necessity of one being ableto intend the world and its structure if one is to intend an entity as equip-ment or as ready-to-hand. The argument turns, once again, on the holisticcharacter of the order of the ready-to-hand. Heidegger asserts, plausibly,that it is a mistake to think of a ready-to-hand entity as just an individualwhose identity conditions turn on spatial and temporal continuity, an indi-vidual that happens to be such that it can be used in a certain way. Brokentools can’t be used as they are “in order to be” used, and not everything thatcan be used in a certain way counts as belonging to a tool type. Rather, inthe case of equipment, that there is some unified individual at all to be in-tended is constituted precisely by what it is to be used for. The identity andindividuation conditions on ready-to-hand entities are themselves “in-or-der-to” determinations. “The specific thisness of a piece of equipment, itsindividuation, if we take the word in a completely formal sense, is not deter-mined primarily by space and time in the sense that it appears in a determi-nate space and time position. Instead, what determines a piece of equipmentas an individual is in each instance its equipmental character and equipmentalcontexture.”21

According to Heidegger, then, not all spatially and temporally continu-ous or connected masses constitute individuals, and not all individual toolsare spatially and temporally continuous and connected masses. A Band-Aidaffixed to a severed hand is not an individual of any order and a set ofbookends can be a single tool. It is that an entity is to be used in order toaccomplish some task, then, that constitutes the entity as a single equipmen-tal entity. But, as the end of this quote hints, no tool can have an equipmen-tal character, an “in-order-to” role, apart from belonging to an equipmentalcontexture, a context of mutually supporting and sustaining teleologicallyorganized roles.This “belonging to” such a context, however, is no fact aboutthe individual tool independent of being intended as to be intended as belong-ing to such a context.22 When instantiated in action, rather than judgment,such “being intended as belonging to an equipmental contexture” is alwaysembodied in some ongoing, integrated pattern or schema of behavior by anagent in which the agent employs a whole series of tools from a given toolchest in order to accomplish ends that are characteristic of the use of thattool chest. What I do with the alcohol when I rub down my blade with arag counts as employing the alcohol as a disinfectant only within the patternof activity that constitutes my gardening. This ongoing, integrated patternor schema of behavior by an agent in which the agent employs a whole se-ries of tools from a given tool chest, in order to accomplish ends that arecharacteristic of the use of that tool chest, displays an understanding of how


things and activities can be fit together in order to accomplish ends. It is it-self an intentional act, an act that amounts to an intentional prejudgmentalunderstanding of the holistic structures in terms of which anything can bein-order-to. Since an intention directed toward a given piece of equipmentas a piece of equipment can only occur as part of such an ongoing set ofactivities, it is a necessary condition on intending a ready-to-hand entitythat one also intend, indeed understand, the structure of relations that con-stitute a world or equipmental context in which tools are.

This characteristic Heideggerian assertion, that the structure of the equip-mental context in which tools function “must be disclosed beforehand witha certain intelligibility,” is the key to understanding Heidegger’s claims re-garding the role of self-directed intentionality. For, Heidegger holds, it ispart of the structure of the world that every such context is anchored bysome “that for the sake of which,” some “potentiality for being” Dasein it-self, which provides the point of the context. “In understanding a contextof relations such as we have mentioned, Dasein has assigned itself to an ‘inorder to’, and it has done so in terms of a potentiality-for-being for the sakeof which it itself is.”23 The thought is simply this. Every teleological processis organized to realize some end. As Aristotle taught, this end can be of oneof two types. Either, as in building, the end is such that when it is attainedthe process ceases. Or, as in living, the end is attained only if the process con-tinues. In the latter case, all that occurs in the process, respiration, digestion,and so forth, is for the sake of the continuation of the process; although the act of respiration is in order to oxygenate the blood, oxygenation of theblood is for the sake of the life of the organism. Now, the typically humanpattern of tool-using behavior that constitutes our primary kind of inten-tional comportment toward tools as tools is of the second type. Gardeningis a way of acting which uses particular tools in particular prescribed waysin order to attain characteristic kinds of goals. While one gardens, that is,while one engages in these kinds of behavior, for these ends with these tools,in order to produce fruit and flowers, one acts so as to produce fruit andflowers only if one is a gardener, that is, only if one intends oneself as a gar-dener and intends the world as gardeners do. My dog acts as dogs act, buthumans act as gardeners act, or shoemakers, or professors. So every act ofgardening is, Heidegger believes, an implicit affirmation of oneself as a cer-tain type of person, a gardener. I garden if, and only if, I understand myselfas a gardener, and I engage in gardening acts for the sake of my being a gar-dener. I garden so that, or for the sake of, my being a gardener, that is, forthe sake of the continuation of my gardening activity. Being a Dasein in theway of being a gardener is, as Kant puts it, an end in itself.

Heidegger thus argues that human activity is distinctive in that the pat-terns of activity and intentionality embodied in that activity have them-

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selves as ends, as well as having external ends. And, as such, any agent thatacts in these ways does so for the sake of being a kind of agent, realizing apossible way of being Dasein. To see the world as a philosopher does, and toact with the tools of his trade as philosophers do, is itself to act for the sakeof being a philosopher and intend oneself as a philosopher. This is Heideg-ger’s third necessary condition on an agent intending a tool as a tool. Onecan intend a tool as a tool only if, in caring for and cultivating things, in be-ing distressed by them, or employing them for something, one intends one-self by way of the activities we pursue, as that for the sake of which we pur-sue them.

Kant argues that the possibility of the “I think” accompanying every actof cognition is a necessary condition on acts of conceptual cognition, orthought. In an exactly parallel manner, Heidegger argues that if an agent iscapable of being in the world, of intending entities as tools that are to beused according to some equipmental type, then that agent also, thereby, in-tends herself as that for the sake of which her world, or the equipmentalcontexture to which she “assigns” herself, is organized. That is, Heideggerargues that the fact of the “for-the-sake-of-which” is a necessary conditionon the possibility of intending a tool as a tool.

But Kant doesn’t merely argue that the possibility of the “I think” is neces-sary for cognition. He also argues that cognition, and with it the possibility ofthe “I think,” is itself necessary for several other kinds of intentional perfor-mance, most notably including intentions directed toward a coherent world ofpossible experience. Similarly, for Heidegger, the ability to intend equipmentas equipment, and the coordinated ability to intend oneself as that for the sakeof which one acts, are necessary for other kinds of intentional performance,most notably including precisely those types of intentions that Kant treats asbasic to human intentionality, cognition, and the possibility of the “I think.”

That Heidegger holds that intending entities within an equipmentalcontexture, and thus being-in-the-world and intending oneself as the for-the-sake-of-which of the world, is necessary for cognition in Kant’s sense,judgment, and the possibility of the “I think,” is displayed by the prioritythat he accords to intentions directed toward the ready-to-hand over thosedirected toward the extant, or present-at-hand. Present-at-hand entities arethose entities whose individuation conditions are such that they turn onspatial and temporal position, connectedness, and continuity, as well as causalpowers. They are the ordinary substances that have been taken to be the ba-sic entities since Aristotle. That intentions directed toward the extant are tobe associated with intentions directed toward objects, in Kant’s sense, andthus with cognition and judgment, is indicated by Heidegger’s analysis ofintentions directed toward the extant. For, he tells us, intentions directed to-ward the extant are actualized only in and through the act of assertion.


If this entity [e.g., a hammer] becomes the “object” of an assertion, then as soon aswe begin this assertion, there is already a change-over in the fore-having. Some-thing ready-to-hand with which we have to do or perform something, turns intosomething “about which” the assertion that points it out is made. . . . This levelingof the primordial “as” of circumspective interpretation to the “as” with which pres-ence-at-hand is given a definite character is the specialty of assertion.24

And assertion, for Heidegger, is “a pointing out which gives something adefinite character and which communicates.”25 So one intends an extantentity insofar as one makes an assertion about it, and one makes an assertionabout it when one communicates that that entity has some definite charac-ter, that is, when one communicates that it is of some definite type.To pointout that some entity is of some definite type, is to make a judgment aboutthat entity. So, to intend the extant as the extant is to make a judgment con-cerning it. As, for Kant, objects as objects are the objects of judgment, Kant’sobjects of possible cognition are just Heidegger’s extant entities.

Heidegger has a different theory of judgment from Kant. And for thatreason there are important differences between Kant’s understanding ofcognitive intentions directed toward objects and Heidegger’s understandingof intentions directed toward the present-at-hand. In particular, early Hei-degger’s emphasis on, and interpretation of, assertion embodies a modifica-tion of Kant. The fact that for Heidegger an assertion is always a pointingout or exhibition of that about which it is an assertion indicates that thatabout which the assertion is made must already have been intentionallygiven prior to the assertion. That is, for Heidegger, all judgment presupposesa prior intention directed toward the entity that is referred to in the asser-tion. Now, in Kant, judgment is always theoretically understood in terms ofrepresentation. What I intend when I judge is my own representation, andit is only by representing that representation as my own and as belonging tosome type, that is, by making a judgment about it, that it becomes possiblefor me to cognitively represent. Heidegger, on the other hand, does not ac-cept Kant’s representational theory of intentionality. The cross-over, thetranscendence of intentionality toward an entity other than myself, must, hesuggests, have already occurred prior to my forming a judgment concerningthat entity. If I didn’t already intend an entity prior to my judging concern-ing it, the judgment could never be an intention directed toward that entity.

Assertion does not as such primarily unveil; instead, it is always, in its sense, alreadyrelated to something antecedently given as unveiled. . . . Some being must be an-tecedently given as unveiled in order to serve as the possible about-which of an as-sertion. But so far as a being is antecedently given for a Dasein it has . . . the char-acter of being within the world. Intentional comportment in the sense of assertionabout something is founded in its ontological structure in the basic constitution ofDasein which we described as being-in-the-world.26

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This analysis of judgment as assertion thus indicates the nature of the pri-ority that Heidegger accords to intentions directed toward the ready-to-handover those directed toward the present-at-hand. The way in which Heideg-ger often asserts this priority makes it seem as if the priority is a genetic one:one first intends an entity as ready-to-hand and then only later does one in-tend it as a substance or object. But this is misleading, at best. Rather, thepriority is a transcendental priority: any agent capable of intending entities ascontinuing substances with properties must also be capable of intending en-tities as ready-to-hand or as useful for realizing some end.

The analysis of judgment as assertion also indicates the nature of Hei-degger’s argument in favor of the claim that being in the world, and thus in-tending oneself as the for-the-sake-of of an equipmental totality, is a neces-sary condition on Kantian style cognition, judgment, and the possibility ofthe “I think.” In outline, the argument runs as follows. The act of judgingabout, or the typing of, objects is properly seen as the act of forming asser-tions about them. Since making an assertion about an object is essentiallyreflectively pointing something out or typing that object, that is, recognizingthat what is intended shares features with other intended entities, and not re-flectively recognizing that our intentions directed toward those entities sharefeatures, one can make assertions concerning those entities only if the enti-ties are intended in some way other than through the act of judging them.Entities are primarily intended as entities only in our circumspective, cop-ing activity that implicitly treats entities as typed by the in-order-to rolesspecified by the equipmental context in which we live. So, unless one werecapable of intending things as ready-to-hand by being-in-the-world, onewould be incapable of forming judgments, and thus incapable of cognition,in Kant’s sense, or of conceptually attaching the “I think” to one’s thoughts.

This transcendental argument sketch is clearly problematic in several dif-ferent ways. Most obviously, to fill in the sketch one would need to showboth that “assertion as such does not primarily unveil” and that entities assuch can only be intended within the intentional structure which Heideg-ger calls “being-in-the-world.”And it is anything but clear that there is any-thing in the Heideggerian corpus that is adequate to these argumentativetasks. It strikes me that there is a more promising strategy for reaching Hei-degger’s conclusion from his premises than the one which Heidegger him-self mostly pursues. For, arguably, the ability to use an articulate language isa necessary condition on the possibility of making discursive judgments. So,if one can support the plausible thesis that language itself is a tool chest ofspecialized tool types, it would follow from Heidegger’s transcendental dis-cussion of the conditions on intending equipment as equipment that noagent could make explicit judgments unless they were also Dasein, or be-ing-in-the-world.


Acknowledging that Heidegger is not much interested in this strategy,however, does not detract from the originality of the early Heidegger’s tran-scendental project. For that project amounts to the attempt to place the en-tire Kantian transcendental project, with its emphasis on the centrality of thereflective act of typing our own mental activity, within a broader intentionalcontext. For Heidegger, that intentional context is provided by a manner ofcoping with the world which is distinctively human, required for Kantiancognition, and does not require the ability to make conceptual judgmentsregarding one’s own mental activity. Heidegger’s name for this kind of in-tentional comportment is “being-in-the-world,” and it involves the abilityto intend oneself as a certain type of agent by intending entities within theworld as to-be-used in determinate ways to achieve determinate ends.

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Like Carnap, Moore, and Wittgenstein, Heidegger developed a debunking strategywith regard to the problem of the external world.As he said, the “scandal of philoso-phy” is not that a proof of the external world has yet to be given, but rather that suchproofs are expected and attempted again and again. Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontologyof human existence (Dasein) purported to show that the problem of the externalworld has no sense at all. However, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit; 1927) is notonly a hermeneutic ontology but also a treatise in transcendental philosophy, andtranscendental philosophy after Kant has been haunted by the problem of the Dingan sich (thing in itself). Does Heidegger’s debunking strategy succeed in avoiding thislatter problem, which is nothing but a Kantian version of the problem of the externalworld? And is Heidegger’s strategy viable from a philosophical point of view?

1.The Problem of the ‘Ding an sich’

According to one of Immanuel Kant’s most celebrated quotes, it remains a“scandal of philosophy . . . that the existence of the things outside us mustbe accepted merely on faith, and that if anyone thinks good to doubt theirexistence, we are unable to counter this doubt by any satisfactory proof.”1

Kant claimed to have remedied this philosophical embarrassment by givinga stringent demonstration of the existence of external reality. But the im-port of his proof, which he staged as a “Refutation of Idealism,” is restricted

chapter

Heidegger’s “Scandal of Philosophy”the problem of the ‘ding an sich’

in ‘being and time’

Herman Philipse

12

to things in the phenomenal world, which are constituted by, and are onto-logically dependent upon, transcendental subjectivity.2 In order to avoid theconclusion that human transcendental subjectivity creates the world and soequals the Divinity, Kant had to assume a “world” in another sense, which hecalled the Ding an sich, that exists independently of the transcendental subject.This hypothesis explains the passive aspect of human experience by postulat-ing that the world an sich impinges on our sense organs and causes a multi-plicity of sensations in us.3 Clearly, then, Kant did not completely succeed inremoving the scandal of philosophy by proving the existence of the externalworld, because he did not provide a proof of the existence of the Ding an sich.

It has been argued by many authors, the first of whom was FriedrichHeinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), that Kant could not provide such a proof. Inorder to explain how a priori propositions such as the axioms of Euclideangeometry can be informative about the external world (“synthetic”), Kantcontended that the subjective cognitive structures that enable us to knowthese propositions a priori are also constitutive of (entities in) the phenom-enal world, and that it is this phenomenal world which is the object ofmathematics, physics, and all other empirical knowledge. Accordingly, weknow a priori that the phenomenal world is Euclidean and obeys the prin-ciple of causality, for example. From this transcendental theory it follows,however, that we cannot state any truths by applying synthetic a prioripropositions or the categories to the world as it is in itself (an sich). What ismore, we cannot know anything whatsoever about the world in itself, be-cause all knowledge is based upon synthetic a priori principles. If this is so,how can Kant claim that the world in itself is causally responsible for the in-put of our transcendental cognitive system?4 Is causality not one of thetwelve categories, and is the field of application of the categories not re-stricted to the phenomenal world? Indeed, how can Kant even say that aDing an sich exists? “Existence” (Dasein, in Kant’s sense) also is a category.

It seems, then, that the hypothesis of a Ding an sich contradicts Kant’stranscendental theory, so that Kant could not argue for that hypothesis onthe basis of his philosophy. And yet, without this hypothesis, no one wouldaccept the transcendental theory in the first place.5 Thus, instead of beingsolved by Kant once and for all, the traditional problem of the externalworld merely transmuted into the problem of the Ding an sich, and thisproblem continued to haunt Kantianism throughout the nineteenth cen-tury. Many different solutions were proposed by authors such as Jacobi(naïve sentimental realism), Fries (1773–1843; psychological Kantianism),and Reinhold (1758–1823; neutral monism or syncretism), but none ofthem could escape from the fundamental paradox that transcendental phi-losophy both requires and excludes the hypothesis of a Ding an sich. In his

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Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie (Critique of Theoretical Philosophy), of 1801,Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833) argued that any attempt to transcend thelimits of possible experience by a transcendental philosophy is condemnedby this very same transcendental philosophy.6 As a result, authors such as Sa-lomon Maimon (1754–1800), Sigismund Beck (1761–1840), and Fichte(1762–1814) came to the conclusion that the very notion of a Ding an sich isan “impossible concept.”7 By transforming the notion of a Ding an sich invarious ways, they paved the road to the embarrassing conclusion that Kanthad tried to avoid, the idealist doctrine that ultimately our transcendentalsubjectivity is identical with the Divinity. Thus, the development of tran-scendental philosophy culminated in Eckhartian mysticism and Germanidealism. The problem of the external world was eliminated by the arbitrarydecision that the world is not external. What we call the world is but an as-pect of our, that is, God’s mind.

When after Hegel’s death German philosophy sobered up from theseidealist speculations, and started to take seriously the impressive advances inthe natural sciences, it was landed again in the intellectual predicament ofthe philosophers of the scientific revolution. The problem of the externalworld, which was raised by these philosophers because of their analysis ofmatter and perception, regained its position at the center of the philosophi-cal stage. A great many solutions were tried out, such as the hypotheticalscientific realism of Herbart (1776–1841) and Brentano (1838–1917); the tran-scendental realism of Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906); the phenomenal-ism of positivists such as Mach; and, later on, Edmund Husserl’s transcen-dental idealism. According to a number of authors, such as von Hartmannand Husserl, the problem of the external world is the central problem ofepistemology. Moreover, epistemology acquired the basic role of first phi-losophy, for its task was to investigate the most fundamental assumption thatunderlies all empirical sciences, namely that there is an external worldwhich exists independently of the human mind.8 No solution to the prob-lem of the external world gained general acceptance, so that Kant’s scandalcontinued to torment philosophers. In this respect, German philosophyfrom Herbart to the neo-Kantians is a replay of the development fromDescartes and Locke to Kant, and no essentially new doctrines emerged.

2. Debunking Strategies

This historical background explains the fact that during the first half of thetwentieth century philosophers started to doubt the very legitimacy of theproblem of the external world. Was the issue a meaningful problem at all,which had to be solved by a philosophical theory or “proof ”? Husserl, for

Heidegger’s “Scandal of Philosophy” 171

example, maintained in 1907 and 1913 that the philosopher should not at-tempt to argue for the existence of the external world; his task was to de-scribe phenomenologically the transcendental correlation between mentalacts and their intentional correlates.Yet Husserl’s elimination of the problemsuffers from a defect similar to that of Fichte’s philosophy, for at the transcen-dental level Husserl held that the world as a whole is ontologically dependenton transcendental subjectivity.9

A different strategy for debunking the problem was proposed by G. E.Moore in 1925 and 1939. Moore did not dispute that one has to prove theexistence of the external world, but he believed that such proofs were so easythat no intricate philosophy was needed to provide them. It would suffice tohold up one’s hands, for example, and to say, pointing to each hand in turn,“Here is one hand,” and “Here is another,” a procedure which allegedlyamounts to a “perfectly rigorous” proof of the existence of external things.10

But Moore’s defense of common sense is unconvincing, for it is open to adouble charge. On the one hand, proofs of the external world à la Moore donot make sense within the framework of common sense, as Wittgenstein ar-gued in On Certainty. On the other hand, Moore’s proofs are an ignoratioelenchi if they are meant to address the philosophical arguments for externalworld skepticism, which are typically based upon a scientific analysis of mat-ter and sense perception.

Whereas Moore attempted to defuse the problem of the external worldfrom the point of view of common sense, Rudolf Carnap tried to eliminateit from a scientific and empiricist perspective. Carnap argued in 1928 thatstatements cannot be meaningful in the sense of having a factual contentunless experiential conditions can be indicated under which they are to becalled true and under which they are to be called false.11 The controversybetween the philosophical solutions to the problem of the external world,such as idealism and realism, is in principle not open to a settlement by ex-periential methods. It follows that these solutions do not have, though theymay seem to have, factual content, and are meaningless from the point ofview of scientific method. Carnap’s dismissal of the external world issue as apseudoproblem survived his liberalization of the empirical meaning criterionin his later works. In 1950, Carnap argued that the problem is an illegitimateconfusion between on the one hand questions of existence internal to a lin-guistic framework, which can be settled by empirical investigations, and onthe other hand external questions about the pragmatic efficiency of such aframework.12

If we write off Moore’s attempt to diffuse the problem of the externalworld as superficial because it does not address the arguments for externalworld skepticism, we will pass the same verdict on Carnap’s strategy. Al-though Carnap is correct in his diagnosis that the problem is meaningless

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from a scientific point of view, because in principle it cannot be settled byexperiential methods, his claim that this result eliminates the problem is il-licit. Indeed, Carnap’s early work strongly suggests the problem of the ex-ternal world. In Aufbau, Carnap justifies his choice of the “autopsychologi-cal” basis for his constitutional system by the demand that the system reflectthe epistemic order of objects. In other words, he holds the view that ourknowledge of physical objects is based upon subjective experiences. Thefact that Carnap wants to “bracket” (in Husserl’s sense) the question of theobjective reality of these experiences at this stage of Aufbau shows that itarises naturally at that point. Bracketing the problem of the external world,that is, exercising a phenomenological “withholding of judgment,” neitheranswers nor eliminates it.13

It is the objective of this chapter to determine whether Martin Heideg-ger’s strategy in Being and Time for disposing of the scandal of philosophy ismore successful than those of Carnap and Moore. Like Husserl, Carnap, andWittgenstein, but unlike Moore, Heidegger held that any attempt to provethe existence of the external world is misguided. The reason is this: “Thequestion of whether there is a world at all and whether its being can beproved, makes no sense if it is raised by Dasein as Being-in-the-world; andwho else would raise it?”14 Hence, having criticized Kant’s proof of the ex-ternal world, Heidegger declares that the “scandal of philosophy” is not thatthis proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attemptedagain and again.”15 Why does Heidegger think that the problem of the exter-nal world does not make sense? And why is it questionable whether Hei-degger’s strategy for eliminating the problem succeeds?

3. Heidegger’s Diagnosis:A Preliminary Sketch

In the introduction to section 43 of Being and Time, Heidegger says that fourdifferent questions are mixed up in the problem of the external world: “(1)whether any entities which supposedly ‘transcend our consciousness’ are at all;(2) whether this reality of the ‘external world’ can be adequately proved; (3) towhat extent this entity, if it is real, can be known in its being-in-itself; (4) whatthe sense [Sinn] of this entity, reality, signifies in general.”16 In the first twoquestions there is a further ambiguity. Are they concerned with the “world”in the sense of entities in the world (innerweltliches Seiendes) or with “world” inthe sense of that within which these entities supposedly are?17

The first task of the philosopher is to clarify these questions. This is whyHeidegger states in section 43a that the fourth question is the most funda-mental one.18 He argues for two theses: first, that what “reality” means, asthe ontological sense of entities in the world, cannot be elucidated withoutan adequate ontological analysis of what is supposedly transcended by these


real entities, to wit, human subjectivity.19 And second, that an adequateanalysis of human existence shows that questions (1) to (3) are meaninglessas they stand. In short, Heidegger claims in his second thesis that the onto-logical analysis of Dasein in the two published divisions of Being and Timeexposes the problem of the external world as a meaningless issue. A briefsummary of some main points will indicate why Heidegger thinks that thisis the case.

Heidegger defines Dasein as “the being that we ourselves are.”20 It is acentral question of Being and Time in terms of which categories we shouldtry to understand ourselves ontologically. According to Heidegger, traditionalphilosophy from the Greeks to our times applied categories to human exis-tence that were originally derived from nonhuman domains, such as artifacts(Hergestelltheit) or other inanimate objects. Since these categories allegedlyare inadequate for understanding our human mode of existence and its tem-poral structure, Heidegger sets himself a double task: a “destruction” of tra-ditional categories by showing why they are inadequate, and a “construc-tion” of a system of new categories for ontological self-understanding, theso-called existentialia.21 In developing these existentialia, we should start fromthe way we understand ourselves implicitly in everyday life (Alltäglichkeit)and, using the method of hermeneutic phenomenology, attempt to explicateconceptually the structural features of our everyday human existence. Thistask is difficult because, as Heidegger says, we are constantly tempted to un-derstand ourselves in terms of the things in the world we relate to, such asartifacts and inanimate objects.22 Although Dasein is “ontically nearest” to it-self, it is “ontologically furthest removed” from itself.23

One of Heidegger’s existentialia is particularly pertinent to the problemof the external world, and, like the other existentialia, it is developed by re-flecting on features of everyday life. It is a striking characteristic of our every-day existence that whenever we try to specify who or what we are, we doso in terms of the “world.”We say, for instance, that we are from a determi-nate country, that we have a job in a specific firm or institution, that we livein a particular town, that we are a son or daughter of so-and-so, and so on.Indeed, it is impossible to specify otherwise who we are, because who we areis deeply determined by the way we are practically involved in the world.On the ontological level of existentialia, Heidegger expresses this feature bysaying that Dasein is “being-in-the-world,” and Division One of Being andTime consists largely of an exploration of this fundamental existentiale and itsvarious aspects. “Being-in,” for instance, does not refer to a spatial relation-ship of two inanimate things but expresses our familiarity with the world inwhich we are involved and in terms of which we understand ourselves.

It follows that, being who we are, it is logically impossible for us to doubtthe existence of the world. Such a doubt is meaningless if uttered by us, be-

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cause, in understanding who we ourselves are, we inevitably refer to theworld. As Heidegger says, the problem of the external world “makes nosense if it is raised by Dasein as Being-in-the-world; and who else wouldraise it?”24 Hence, “The problem of reality in the sense of the questionwhether there is an external world and whether such a world can beproved, turns out to be an impossible one, not because its consequences leadto inextricable impasses, but because the very entity which serves as itstheme, is one which, as it were, repudiates any such formulation of thequestion.”25 In Wittgenstein’s terminology, one might say that there is an in-ternal relation between Dasein and world, so that it cannot make sense forus to doubt the existence of the world. And where doubting does not makesense, there is no room for proofs of the existence of the external world ei-ther. Once we articulate a more adequate ontology of Dasein, that is, of oureveryday existence in the world, we see that the problem of the externalworld cannot make sense. It follows that ontology, and not epistemology(defined as the discipline that deals with the problem of the external world),is the fundamental philosophical discipline.26

To the extent that I have depicted it so far, Heidegger’s strategy for elim-inating the problem of the external world by an ontology of Dasein bearsstriking resemblances with, but also interesting differences from, the strate-gies of Moore and Carnap. The perspective in which Heidegger views theproblem, that of everyday life (Alltäglichkeit), resembles Moore’s perspectiveof common sense, although in contrast to Moore, Heidegger explores indepth what this perspective consists in. Yet in another respect Heideggercontrasts favorably with Moore. Like the later Wittgenstein (On Certainty),but unlike Moore, Heidegger holds that within the perspective of ordinarylife there is no room for proofs of the external world, because doubting itsexistence does not make sense.

As far as Carnap is concerned, it seems at first sight that the differencebetween his strategy and Heidegger’s could not be greater, for Carnap ap-proaches the problem from the point of view of scientific method, whereasHeidegger prefers the perspective of ordinary life. Heidegger would haveagreed with Carnap that the problem of the external world is not a mean-ingful scientific question, but he would have argued that this insight is su-perficial and does not remove the problem. In order to eliminate it, we haveto analyze ontologically the very sense in which we may be said to exist andthe sense of “world” and “reality.”

Yet there is a striking resemblance between Heidegger and the later Car-nap at this very point. Both Heidegger (1927) and Carnap (1950) make adistinction between empirical questions of existence, concerned with par-ticular entities, and a global framework without which such questions donot have a determinate meaning. In Carnap’s case, global frameworks are


linguistic and optional. We may choose different linguistic frameworks atwill, using considerations of practical expediency. For Heidegger, however,the encompassing framework of the “world” is prelinguistic and always al-ready there: it is the background or horizon of all our choices and not itselfan option. Here again, Heidegger is closer to Wittgenstein than to Carnap.In On Certainty, Wittgenstein argues that we cannot meaningfully doubtpropositions that express the bedrock of all our language games. This bed-rock is not optional, because it belongs to our human form of life.

Using the distinction between on the one hand the world as a back-ground or framework and on the other hand entities in the world (inner-weltliche Seiende), we may now summarize as follows Heidegger’s view onthe scandal of philosophy. The problem of the external world concerns ei-ther entities in the world or the world as a framework. In the first case, theproblem of the external world is not a philosophical question. With regardto many particular entities in the world we may wonder whether they exist,but this is an empirical and not a philosophical issue, which has to be settledby experiential methods.27 In the second case, of the world as a framework,the problem does not make sense, because Dasein and the world form oneunitary phenomenon: Dasein is being-in-the-world. “World” here meansnot the totality of entities or the totality of facts but “that ‘wherein’ a facti-cal Dasein as such ‘lives.’”28 The world in this sense is a meaningful struc-ture of referential and functional relations (Bezugszusammenhang) betweenequipment, work, institutions, infrastructure, and so on, without whichhumans and nonhuman things could not show up for us as that what theyare. On the one hand, this structure cannot be without Dasein, because allits referential relations are informed ultimately by a “for-the-sake-of ”(Worum-willen) that is Dasein itself. On the other hand, Dasein cannot bewithout world, because it is always involved in it and interprets itself in itsterms.29

We may conclude that Heidegger’s strategy for debunking the problem ofthe external world is superior to the strategies of Carnap and Moore, sinceHeidegger combines the virtues of their accounts while avoiding some ofthe weaknesses. This does not imply, however, that Heidegger’s strategy is aviable one. In order to reach a decision on this matter, two kinds of consid-erations are required. On the one hand, there are several problems of inter-pretation to be settled. On the other hand, we must evaluate philosophicallythe strategy we attribute to Heidegger. Although these two kinds of consid-erations are different, and even though interpretation must precede evalua-tion, philosophical reflection is relevant to matters of interpretation becauseinterpretations have to be maximally “charitable.” In the next section, Iidentify four problem areas pertaining to the interpretation of Heidegger’s

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strategy. Can the problems of these areas be solved by an interpretation thatattributes to Heidegger a consistent and viable philosophical strategy?

4. Problems and Method of Interpretation

Heidegger’s strategy for debunking the problem of the external world on thebasis of an ontology of Dasein is questionable because of a fundamental am-biguity in the very notion of Dasein, and, indeed, in the “question of being”that informs Being and Time. In one sense, the question of being aims at de-veloping regional ontologies, such as the ontologies of nature, of Dasein, oflife, or of space-time, and so on, by spelling out fundamental concepts for ar-ticulating these regions.30 In the context of regional ontology, Heideggermeans by “being” the particular mode of being of entities belonging to a spe-cific ontological region. Since Dasein is characterized by self-interpretation,the method of the regional ontology of Dasein is the method of hermeneuticphenomenology. In my Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being (1998), I called this the“phenomenologico-hermeneutical leitmotif” in the question of being.

In a second sense, the question of being is a transcendental question.Heidegger holds that the being (Sein) of entities is determined by Dasein’sunderstanding of being (Seinsverständnis), and he compares the “philosophi-cal phenomenon” of being with Kantian transcendental structures.31 In thecontext of this “transcendental theme,” Heidegger means by being a holis-tic transcendental framework that is somehow constitutive for the way inwhich entities appear to us, and he holds that being in this sense dependsupon Dasein, that is, upon Dasein’s understanding of being.

The fact that the ontological analysis of Dasein is both a regional ontol-ogy and a transcendental philosophy renders the notion of Dasein ambigu-ous. Dasein not only is “the being that we ourselves are,” as Heidegger saysin section 2 of Being and Time, but Dasein also is the transcendental agent inus.32 Furthermore, whereas Dasein in the sense of regional ontology ismerely one ontological region among others, Dasein in the sense of tran-scendental philosophy is unique and more fundamental than any other on-tological region, because it somehow constitutes these other regions. Ac-cordingly, the transcendental philosophy of Dasein develops “the conditionsfor the possibility of any ontological investigation.”33

We might say that the phenomenologico-hermeneutical leitmotif in thequestion of being is its pole of plurality, because it aims at articulating themany senses in which “being” is said (there are many ontological regions),whereas the transcendental leitmotif is its pole of unity, because all notions of“being” are transcendentally reducible to Dasein’s understanding of being(Seinsverständnis). Hence, Heidegger’s question of being has a bipolar structure


similar to Aristotle’s question of being.34 If this is correct, there is one globalinterpretative issue that should be resolved if we want to assess the philo-sophical viability of Heidegger’s debunking strategy. Does Heidegger wantto show that the problem of the external world is meaningless by a regionalontology of Dasein, by a transcendental philosophy of Dasein, or by both? Morein particular, one might distinguish four areas of interpretative problems:

A. One cannot doubt that there are transcendental arguments in Being andTime. According to Heidegger, the “Being” (Sein) of things depends uponDasein’s “understanding of the Being” (Seinsverständnis) of things.35 In otherwords, the “subjective” conditions for understanding being, such as the orig-inary temporality of Dasein, are also “objective” conditions for being. In thepast, all such transcendental theories turned out to imply a specific varietyof the problem of the external world: the problem of the Ding an sich (sec-tion 1, above). We may wonder how Heidegger can be a transcendentalphilosopher and also claim that he eliminates this problem (instead of pro-viding some solution to it). How should we interpret Heidegger’s attemptto reconcile the “no problem” view with the “transcendental” view? DoesHeidegger succeed in reconciling them?

B. The first problem area condenses, as it were, into a number of passages inthe text of Being and Time, which David Cerbone has aptly called “puzzlepassages.”36 Here are two of them:

(1) Being (not entities) is something which “there is” only insofar as truth is. Andtruth is only insofar as and as long as Dasein is.37

(2) Entities are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed,the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their na-ture is ascertained. But Being “is” only in the understanding of those entities towhose being something like an understanding of Being belongs.38

In these puzzle passages, Heidegger tries to reconcile some version of “en-tity-realism” with some version of “being-idealism” (being “is” only in theunderstanding by Dasein).39 But how is that possible, if “being” is defined as“that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which enti-ties are already understood, however we may elucidate them in detail”?40

The solutions of Kant and Husserl consisted in a combination of empiricalrealism regarding entities and transcendental idealism regarding constitutivestructures (“being”). However, both solutions implied that empirical entitiesare transcendentally constituted, so that, on the transcendental level, there isentity idealism with regard to empirical entities. Furthermore, both solu-tions raised the problem of the Ding an sich, the existence of which was af-firmed by Kant and denied by Husserl.41 What solution does Heidegger

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propose? How can Heidegger reconcile his solution with his claim that theproblem of the external world is meaningless?

C. In section 3, above, I argued that Heidegger’s strategy for debunking theproblem of the external world is superior to the strategies of Carnap andMoore. However, this apology for Heidegger is seriously incomplete. Wesaw that both Moore and Carnap failed to address the reasons for externalworld skepticism, reasons which derive predominantly from a scientificanalysis of matter and perception. Does Heidegger fare better in this re-spect, so that his analysis is superior on this point as well? In section 43a ofBeing and Time there is a passage in which Heidegger diagnoses the sourceof external world skepticism as follows:

Our task is not to prove that and how there is an “external world,” but to point outwhy Dasein, as being-in-the-world, has the tendency first to annul “epistemologi-cally” the “external world” in order to prove it afterward. The cause (Grund) of thislies in Dasein’s falling and in the way in which the primary understanding of Beinghas been diverted to Being as occurrentness—a diversion which is motivated by thatfalling itself.42

But this passage is not sufficiently clear. In particular, it is unclear why Hei-degger thinks that what he calls Dasein’s falling (Verfallen) is the cause(Grund) of external world skepticism, and why analyzing this cause will re-fute the arguments for external world skepticism. An interpretation of Hei-degger’s strategy for debunking the problem of the external world has toclarify this point.

D. A final area of difficulties consists of Heidegger’s pronouncements on the Ding an sich in Being and Time. Within the global horizon or frameworkof the world, Heidegger distinguishes between a number of more deter-minate frameworks in terms of which we may interpret the entities that we encounter.43 Two of these frameworks are discussed in Being and Time,the framework of being ready-to-hand or being serviceable (zuhanden) and theframework of being present-to-hand, extant, being occurrent, or being pres-ent (vorhanden). Other frameworks are merely mentioned, such as the frame-work of nature as that “which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthrallsus as landscape.”44 Now Heidegger writes repeatedly in italics that “Readi-ness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are determinedontologico-categorially.”45 This is surprising, for in the Kantian tradition, enti-ties are said to be an sich if they are ontologically independent with regardto the (transcendental) subject, whereas equipment and other entities thatare ready-to-hand (zuhanden) are implausible candidates for this position.Why, then, does Heidegger claim that readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) is


the way things are an sich? The fact that the relevant statements are italicizedproves their importance for the interpretation of Being and Time.

Since the text of Being and Time is unclear at many crucial points, substan-tial interpretations of Heidegger’s strategy for debunking the problem of theexternal world will be underdetermined by the texts. For this reason wemust evaluate the existing interpretations by a comparative analysis and in-quire to what extent they satisfy a number of criteria for theory-choice.With regard to the interpretation of philosophical texts, the two most im-portant criteria for theory-choice are: (1) the criterion of historical textualadequacy, and (2) the criterion of philosophical fecundity. Is it possible todevelop an interpretation of Heidegger’s strategy that solves the problems ofareas A–D, above, and that is both textually adequate in an historically plau-sible way and philosophically fruitful?

5. Recent Interpretations: Being Idealism

Most recent interpretations of the way in which Heidegger deals with theproblem of the external world in Being and Time focus on area B, the puzzlepassages. How are we to interpret and reconcile the “being idealism” andthe “entity realism” affirmed in these texts? Let me begin by sketching thespace of possible solutions.

According to (a) a minimalist reading of “being idealism,” Heideggerian“being” is just the meaning or significance that we humans attribute to en-tities; it is what entities are understood as. A maximalist reading (b) wouldinterpret Heideggerian “being” as an entity-constitutive transcendental frame-work à la Kant and Husserl, a position that I call “strong transcendentalism.”Between (a) and (b), there is an intermediate interpretation (c), according towhich “being” is a transcendental framework which is not constitutive ofentities but only of that “as what” entities are encountered. Let me call thisview “weak transcendentalism.”

With regard to “entity realism,” readings (b) and (c) of “being idealism”invite us to make a distinction between an empirical and a transcendentalpoint of view. We may then interpret Heidegger’s entity realism either (m)on the empirical level (empirical realism) or (n) on the transcendental level(transcendental realism), or both. Even if we do not make this distinction, wehave a choice between (o) restricting entity realism to occurrent (Vorhanden)entities or (p) interpreting it more generally. If we opt for (m) empirical en-tity realism, we may regard questions concerning entities at the transcenden-tal level as either (q) meaningful or (r) meaningless.

In order to produce a complete interpretation of the puzzle passages, wehave to combine one element of (a–c) with more than one element of

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(m–r). Some combinations are clearly unsatisfactory. For example, if oneunites (b) with (m), (o), and (q), Heidegger would be faced with the tradi-tional problem of the Ding an sich, whereas he claims to have shown thatthis problem is senseless. We are investigating whether it is possible to de-velop a complete interpretation that explains all relevant texts and is philo-sophically interesting in itself.

Apart from the two puzzle passages I quoted, there is a third one, whichseems to exclude both transcendental realism (n) and transcendental ideal-ism concerning entities:

(3) Of course only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding ofbeing is ontically possible),“is there” being. When Dasein does not exist,“indepen-dence”“is” not either, nor “is” the “in itself.” In such a case this sort of thing can beneither understood nor not understood. In such a case even entities within-the-world can neither be discovered nor lie hidden. In such a case it cannot be said thatentities are, nor can it be said that they are not. But now, as long as there is an un-derstanding of Being and therefore an understanding of occurrentness, it can indeedbe said that in this case entities will still continue to be.46

In this passage, Heidegger seems to rule out transcendental entity realismbecause he states that the independence of entities with regard to Dasein isitself dependent upon Dasein, and that there is no “in itself ” without Da-sein. As Cerbone says, “this passage has the effect of nesting the indepen-dence claim within a broader claim of dependence, thereby undercutting astraightforwardly realistic understanding of entities.”47 But of course, thepassage also seems to exclude transcendental idealism with regard to entities.For Heidegger says,“In such a case it cannot be said that entities are, nor canit be said that they are not.” I shall come back to the issue of transcendentalentity realism later on (sections 7 and 9). Let me first focus on two interpre-tative problems that are somewhat easier to solve: the problems of beingidealism and of empirical entity realism.

With regard to being idealism, the minimalist interpretation (a) has beendefended by Dorothea Frede, among others. “If a thing’s being consists in itsmeaning, then it only has a being when there is someone for whom this isits meaning.”48 Although she does not explicitly make a distinction betweenthe empirical and the transcendental level, she restricts entity realism to oc-current (vorhanden) entities (o): we interpret these entities as existing indepen-dently from us.49 This explains why the “independence” of entities dependson Dasein. As she says, “with things ready-at-hand it is different,” for they“lose their ontological status as soon as there is nobody who could make useof their practical meaningfulness.”50 Furthermore, Frede endorses a variety of(r). Heidegger could reject the demand for proofs of the external world be-cause “things have an ‘in themselves’ only if there is some understanding


within which they are what they are. The question what they are apart fromthis meaning turns out . . . to be senseless.”51

William Blattner correctly objects to minimalist interpretations of beingidealism such as Frede’s that they trivialize Heidegger’s transcendental argu-ments, so that they fail for problem area A. Interpretation (a) makes Heideg-ger’s being idealism true by redefinition. If one defines “being” as “a thing’smeaning” (Frede) or as a thing’s “intelligibility to us” (Olafson),52 and if oneassumes, plausibly, that we humans give meaning to things, it is trivially truethat being depends on Dasein. Such an interpretation is both philosophi-cally sterile, because it trivializes Heidegger’s being idealism, and textuallyinadequate. For although interpretation (a) seems to fit Heidegger’s defini-tion of “being” as “that in terms of which entities are already understood,”Heidegger also defines “being” as “that which determines entities as enti-ties.”53 Furthermore, Heidegger explicitly rejects the view that an entity’sbeing ready-at-hand should be conceived of as a “subjective colouring”given to some world-stuff that is already there in itself.54

Should we then opt for interpretation (b) of being idealism, the maxi-malist view that entities are constituted by transcendental frameworks? Ac-cording to this view, shared by Kant and Husserl, the most fundamental linkbetween consciousness and entities in the world is perception. In percep-tion, the transcendental subject constitutes empirical entities out of its ownsubjective sensations. Whereas Kant stipulated a Ding an sich in order to ac-count for the passive aspect of perception at the transcendental level,Husserl held that this notion of a Ding an sich is meaningless, although in1913 he speculated about God as a theological principle that might explainthe order of sensations in transcendental consciousness.55 In other words,whereas Kant was a transcendental realist concerning entities (although hewas a transcendental idealist with regard to space and time), Husserl was, likeBerkeley, a transcendental idealist concerning entities (with the exception ofGod and, indeed, other minds).56

Clearly, versions of strong transcendentalism are inadequate as an inter-pretation of Being and Time, although they do imply empirical realism withregard to entities in the world. In the first place, Heidegger explicitly deniesthat perceptual knowledge is the fundamental link between the world andourselves. According to his analysis of Dasein as being-in-the-world, per-ceptual knowledge, and, indeed, knowledge in general, is a secondary,“founded” mode of access to innerworldly things. “All access to such enti-ties is founded ontologically upon the basic structure of Dasein, being-in-the-world,” Heidegger says, summarizing his analysis.57 It follows that ourbeing-in-the-world can never be explained in terms of the perceptual rela-tion. In the second place, Heidegger rejects transcendental idealism if it“signifies tracing back every entity to a subject or consciousness . . . ” but

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this is precisely what strong transcendentalism does.58 Finally, it is unclearhow strong transcendentalism can avoid the problem of the external world,whereas Heidegger claims that he succeeds in eliminating the problem asmeaningless.

I conclude that we should interpret Heidegger’s being idealism in sense(c), weak transcendentalism. Within the context of the transcendental leit-motif, Heideggerian “being” in Being and Time is a transcendental frame-work that is not constitutive of entities but only of that “as what” entities areencountered.59 Many authors adopt this interpretation, such as Blattner (1994,1999), Dreyfus (1991), Mulhall (1996), and Philipse (1998).

6. Recent Interpretations: Empirical Entity Realism

These authors may still differ on two issues. First, they may have differentviews on what Heidegger’s conception of a transcendental frameworkamounts to. A Heideggerian transcendental framework cannot be a mereconceptual scheme in the sense of a set of rules for using words, becauseHeidegger holds that the world as that in which we are involved is mean-ingful independently from language. World is characterized by holistic sig-nificance (Bedeutsamkeit) and language can be used for articulating pre-ex-isting meanings: “To meanings, words accrue.”60 This is a major differencebetween Heidegger and Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein, words have mean-ing because of the way in which they are used, so that there can be nomeaning without standard uses of words, although Wittgenstein also stressesthat language games cannot be understood apart from forms of life.

Second, weak transcendentalism as an interpretation of being idealismmay be combined with various interpretations of Heidegger’s entity realism.What does Heidegger mean when he says that “entities are, quite indepen-dently of the experience by which they are disclosed . . . ” (puzzle passage[2])? If we focus on puzzle passage (3), which nests the independence claimwithin a deeper dependence of Dasein (“When Dasein does not exist, ‘in-dependence’ ‘is’ not either . . . ”), it is plausible to interpret the indepen-dence of entities with regard to Dasein as a feature attributed to entitieswithin a particular transcendental framework ([m], empirical realism).Whereas Mulhall holds (p) that Dasein encounters both occurrent andready-to-hand things “as phenomena which exist independently of its en-counters with them,” most authors (Blattner, Dreyfus, Frede, Schatzki) re-strict this independence to the framework of occurrentness (o).61 Which ofthese two conflicting views is correct as an interpretation of Being and Time?

At first sight, neither the text of puzzle passage (3) nor its context in sec-tion 43c permits us to answer this question with certainty. Although Hei-degger links the characteristic of independence with the notion of reality,


he distinguishes between a wider and a narrower sense of “reality” in thefirst paragraph of section 43c. In the wider sense, reality is the mode of be-ing of all nonhuman entities in the world, either occurrent or ready-to-hand. In the narrower and more traditional sense, reality is the mode of be-ing of occurrent entities only.62 Since Heidegger does not tell us in whichof these two senses he is going to use the word “reality” in the remainder ofsection 43c, it may seem that both interpretation (p) and interpretation (o)are permitted by the text of Being and Time.

One cannot argue that one of these apparently permitted interpretationsis more charitable than the other because it attributes a philosophically su-perior opinion to Heidegger. The reason is that Heidegger’s notions of oc-currentness (Vorhandenheit), readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), and indepen-dence are too ill-defined for constructing a satisfactory philosophical view.For example, Heidegger does not distinguish between things accidentallyused as tools (one picks up a stone in order to throw it at a dog) and tools asartifacts (a hammer). The stone is both dependent on Dasein and indepen-dent from Dasein. On the one hand, it is dependent because it becomes atool when it is picked up and loses its status as a tool again when it isthrown away. On the other hand it is independent because humans did notproduce it and because it may continue to be after all humans have per-ished. The hammer also is both dependent and independent with regard toDasein, but in a somewhat different sense. It is dependent in the sense that ithas been made on purpose as an artifact in which its function is inscribed,so to say, and because it fits in with a referential totality of functions (ofnails, wood, etc.). If humans did not exist, hammers would not exist either.But the hammer is also independent because it continues to exist and to beready for use even when nobody is aware of its existence; indeed it maycontinue to exist when all humans have died.63

Yet a more careful reading of section 43 in the context of Being and Timeas a whole justifies interpretation (o), which restricts to occurrent thingsHeidegger’s “realism” with regard to entities said to be “independent” fromDasein. There are three textual arguments for this interpretation. First, Hei-degger starts section 43b by declaring that “nothing else is meant by” theterm “reality” than things occurrent (vorhanden) within-the-world.64 Be-cause puzzle passage (3) follows Heidegger’s ruminations on the notion ofreality, it is plausible to read it as concerned primarily with occurrent things.Second, Heidegger intimates in section 43a that the notion of “indepen-dence” is associated with the notion of reality.65 Combining these twopoints, one comes to the conclusion that Heidegger links the notion of “in-dependence” to the notion of occurrence. Finally, the last sentence of puz-zle passage (3) relates independence from Dasein, in the sense of continuingto be there without Dasein, explicitly to Dasein’s understanding of occur-

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rentness:“But now, as long as there is an understanding of Being and there-fore an understanding of occurrentness, it can indeed be said that then [towit, when Dasein does not exist] entities will still continue to be.”66

The most important point is, however, that according to puzzle passage(3), this independence from Dasein depends itself upon Dasein:“When Da-sein does not exist, ‘independence’ ‘is’ not either, nor ‘is’ the ‘in itself.’” Inother words, the independence of entities with regard to Dasein is a charac-teristic which depends upon a transcendental framework. Only because oc-current entities are encountered within such a framework can they be en-countered as independent from us. The entity realism Heidegger defends inpuzzle passage (3) is an empirical realism concerning occurrent entities. Butwhat about realism at the transcendental level? Is Heidegger also a transcen-dental realist or is he a transcendental agnostic with regard to entities?Whereas puzzle passage (3) seems to exclude transcendental realism, puzzlepassage (2) seems to affirm it.67

7.The Transcendental Standpoint

The most sophisticated interpretation of what we can say at the transcen-dental level has been proposed by William Blattner, who focuses on puzzlepassage (3). As I mentioned already, Blattner restricts Heidegger’s entity real-ism at the empirical level to occurrent entities.68 With regard to the tran-scendental level in (3), he distinguishes between a trivial and a more sub-stantial interpretation (a “weak” and a “strong” reading, as he calls it) of thefollowing clause from (3): “When Dasein does not exist, ‘independence’ ‘is’not either, nor ‘is’ the ‘in itself.’ In such a case this sort of thing can be nei-ther understood nor not understood. In such a case even entities within-the-world can neither be discovered nor lie hidden. In such a case it cannotbe said that entities are, nor can it be said that they are not.” According tothe trivial reading, Heidegger here specifies what is the case under the cir-cumstances of our nonexistence. It is trivially true that without Daseinnothing can be related to Dasein as independent or dependent, as under-stood or not understood, as discovered or hidden, and that without Daseinthere is no speech. Blattner rejects this reading not only because it is trivialbut also because it leaves Heidegger without an interesting transcendentalargument for the dependence of being on Dasein. But what is Blattner’smore substantive interpretation?

Blattner claims that Heidegger in this passage says something of the cir-cumstances of Dasein’s nonexistence. These circumstances annul the generalhuman framework or “human standpoint” without which questions of de-pendence or independence, understanding or nonunderstanding, discoveryor hiddenness, and existence or nonexistence do not make sense. Because


they annul this general framework, we cannot even ask, at the transcenden-tal level, whether entities exist or whether they are independent from Da-sein. At the transcendental level, no answer to these questions can have atruth value, so that Heidegger is neither a transcendental realist nor a tran-scendental idealist about entities. In other words, because being, in the senseof the holistic transcendental framework, depends on Dasein (being ideal-ism), and because being is “that which determines entities as entities,” theassumption of the absence of Dasein implies that questions concerning en-tities must lack a determinate answer.

Blattner explains his interpretation with reference to the standard ac-count of presuppositions. It is senseless to ask “Who is the president of En-gland?” because this question presupposes, mistakenly, that in England aspecific political framework is in place, the framework of the presidentialsystem. Similarly, all questions about existence and (in)dependence of enti-ties would presuppose a maximally global framework, the human frame-work or “world.”We descend to the transcendental level if we discover thisframework and wonder what can be said about entities if it is not in place.According to Blattner, Heidegger claims that at this level, nothing whatso-ever can be said about the (in)dependence or (non)existence of entities.

But why does Heidegger think that there is such a global framework thatdepends on Dasein? Why is he a transcendental idealist concerning being?According to Blattner, the basic premise of Heidegger’s transcendental argu-ment is that without Dasein, there would be no time (temporal idealism).Furthermore, because the very being of entities has a temporal structure orsense, being also depends upon Dasein. Temporal idealism implies transcen-dental idealism about being. And transcendental idealism about being im-plies that at the transcendental level there is a failure of bivalence if ques-tions concerning the (non)existence and (in)dependence of entities areraised apart from the human framework. Heidegger’s being idealism doesnot result from a mere redefinition of “being,” as Dorothea Frede holds, butis the conclusion of a substantial transcendental argument.

Blattner’s interpretation elegantly solves the central problem of this chap-ter, the issue of how Heidegger could reconcile a variety of transcendentalphilosophy with his view that the philosophical problem of the externalworld is meaningless (problem areas A and B). Supposing that the problemis concerned with entities and not with the world as a holistic transcenden-tal framework, we might locate it either at the empirical or at the transcen-dental level, depending on whether it presupposes or suspends the set oftranscendental conditions. At the empirical level, the problem boils down tothe question of whether specific occurrent entities really exist, but this is apurely empirical issue, to be settled by empirical investigations. Here, wecan say that many occurrent entities will continue to exist even when the

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human race will have died out (puzzle passage [3]). At the transcendentallevel, however, the conditions under which questions of existence makesense are suspended, so that answers to these questions lack bivalence andare senseless. At this level, the level of the Ding an sich, we cannot meaning-fully say that entities exist (or do not exist) and will continue to exist (orwill not continue to exist) when there is no Dasein. Heidegger rejects thetraditional notion of a Ding an sich, as did his teacher Husserl, since it doesnot make sense to speculate about the question of how things are apartfrom the transcendental framework that is presupposed by all questions con-cerning any thing whatsoever.

Let us assume, for the moment, that Blattner’s interpretation is optimallyadequate with regard to the text of Being and Time (although it does not ex-plain problem areas C and D), and raise the issue as to whether Heidegger’sdoctrine, so interpreted, is tenable from a philosophical point of view. Amongthe four objections against his interpretation that Blattner discusses in his 1994article, there is one that he announces as “a further and more far reachingchallenge, one to the very idea that Heidegger could think that such a tran-scendental standpoint is coherent or conceivable.”69 Since “Heidegger insiststhat all understanding takes place in the context of an involvement in theworld,” one might conclude that “the detached, uninvolved perspective of thetranscendental standpoint is simply impossible.” If this is correct, Blattner says,Heidegger’s implicit claim that at the transcendental level statements aboutentities lack bivalence “turns out to be a disappointing consequence of a moregeneral and debilitating failure of the transcendental standpoint as I have de-scribed it.”70 Indeed, if Heidegger’s transcendental philosophy excludes thatwe may adopt a transcendental standpoint, his strategy of eliminating theproblem of the Ding an sich by first adopting the transcendental standpointand then limiting what can be said from that standpoint cannot make sense.

Both in his 1994 article and in his 1999 book, Blattner admits that “thegeneral thrust of this objection is correct,” although “one can say somethingfrom the transcendental standpoint.”71 That is, we can exploit the conse-quences of the assumption that there is no Dasein. These consequences arethat in that case there is no being, in the sense of a holistic transcendentalframework, and that questions concerning the existence or nonexistence ofentities do not make sense. In the article, but, surprisingly, not in the book,Blattner elaborates this answer by distinguishing between two senses of theexpression “transcendental standpoint.” On the one hand, (1) the transcenden-tal standpoint is the point of view one occupies when one asks after the con-ditions for the possibility of (a priori) knowledge. From this standpoint, oneallegedly discovers that there is a holistic transcendental framework which de-termines entities as entities and which depends upon Dasein. On the otherhand, (2) one might also call “transcendental standpoint” the point of view


one tries to occupy by asking what things are like independently of the holis-tic transcendental framework (the question of the Ding an sich in the Kantiansense). Strictly speaking, one cannot occupy the transcendental standpoint inthis latter sense, because the question one attempts to ask is meaningless.72

However, by distinguishing between these two kinds of transcendentalstandpoint Blattner fails to take the sting out of the philosophical objection.In my 1998 book, I argued, with reference to Davidson’s article “On theVery Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” that the notion of a comprehensive tran-scendental framework is incoherent because, if the framework is really com-prehensive, we cannot specify what is framed by the framework. And if wecannot specify what is framed by the framework, the notion of a frameworkhas no clear sense either.73 Applying Davidson’s argument to Heidegger asinterpreted by Blattner, we come to the conclusion that if we cannot makemeaningful statements about entities from the transcendental standpoint inthe second sense (2), we cannot make meaningful statements about thecomprehensive transcendental scheme from the transcendental standpoint inthe first sense (1) either. This result confirms Gottlob Ernst Schulze’s verdictaccording to which any attempt to transcend the limits of possible experi-ence by a transcendental philosophy is condemned by this very same tran-scendental philosophy. Can one avoid this verdict, which shipwrecks Hei-degger’s alleged strategy of debunking the problem of the external world,by means of a transcendental philosophy?74

8. Readiness-to-Hand as Being ‘an Sich’

A radical tactic for avoiding the verdict is to do away with transcendentalphilosophy. One might deny that there are transcendental arguments in Be-ing and Time and reject the distinction between the empirical and the tran-scendental standpoint as an interpretation of puzzle passage (3). One simplystresses what Heidegger says about Dasein or being-in-the-world as a uni-tary phenomenon and explains puzzle passage (3) as saying that our under-standing of (occurrent) entities as independent from us humans “cannot bedetached from our fundamental way of being, namely being-in-the-world.”This is the interpretation preferred by David Cerbone and by Theodore R.Schatzki.75 But it is clearly unsatisfactory because it fails for problem area A.

For this reason, we must try out more moderate methods, which purportto rescue some kind of transcendental scheme from the Davidsonian ob-jection. Since the Davidsonian objection holds against the very idea of com-prehensive transcendental schemes only, we must try to restrict the scope ofHeidegger’s transcendental frameworks and make room for the possibility ofencountering entities apart from specific transcendental schemes, or, at least,for the possibility of establishing identity conditions for entities across dif-

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ferent transcendental frameworks. I shall now discuss two of such moremoderate methods or interpretations, which both have an anchorage inHeideggerian texts. Both of these interpretations hold that, according toHeidegger, we are able to know or at least encounter things as they are inthemselves (an sich), apart from transcendental schemes. What they differabout is the nature of things as they are in themselves. Let us call them thethesis of the primacy of readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and the thesis ofthe primacy of occurrentness (Vorhandenheit), respectively.

The textual anchorage of the first interpretation consists of those pas-sages in Being and Time where Heidegger says, in italics, that “Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are determined onto-logico-categorially” (see problem area D). Heidegger puts the expression ansich in quotes because the point of these passages is not to contrast the waythings are in themselves with the way things are for us. Heidegger’s point israther that the way things are for us primarily, that is, as the colorful and ser-viceable things of everyday life in the everyday world, things which aremeaningful to us within the horizon of the world, precisely is the way thingsare in themselves. As we have seen, with regard to things in the world soconceived it is not meaningful for Dasein to raise the problem of the exter-nal world, because Dasein defines itself in terms of these things. The ideathat Dasein might be what it is and at the same time exist without its every-day world is simply incoherent. But if this is so, why and how did the prob-lem of the external world arise in the first place?

Heidegger’s answer to this question is provided by the text I quoted inproblem area C:“the cause of this lies in Dasein’s falling and in the way inwhich the primary understanding of Being has been diverted to Being asoccurrentness [Vorhandenheit]—a diversion which is motivated by thatfalling itself.” Heidegger argues both in Being and Time and in his lecturecourse on Kant of the winter semester 1935–36, published in 1962 as WhatIs a Thing? (Die Frage nach dem Ding?), that during the scientific revolution anew metaphysical view of nature became dominant, according to which na-ture is a mathematical multiplicity of entities that lack many of the featureswhich we attribute to them in everyday life, such as colors and other sec-ondary qualities, or meaningfulness. Although Heidegger does not spell outthe connection between this metaphysical view and external world skepti-cism, it is easy to see how the new metaphysics of nature gave rise to theproblem of the external world. For reasons of succinctness I use Wilfrid Sel-lars’s terminology and call this new metaphysics of nature the “scientific im-age” of the world, whereas the “manifest image” is our view of the world asit manifests itself in daily life.

The philosophers of the scientific revolution argued (1) that the scientificimage is incompatible with the manifest image because material entities as


conceived of by the new physics lack secondary qualities such as colors,smells, hot or cold, and so forth. This incompatibility thesis raises a problemconcerning the ontological priority of these images. If one accepts (2) thethesis that the scientific image is ontologically adequate and primary, aproblem concerning perception results: what is the status of the colors,sounds, and smells that we perceive, if they are not really there in physicalnature? The philosophers of the scientific revolution resolved this issue byendorsing (3) the subjectivity thesis: perceived secondary properties are “im-pressions in the mind,” caused by physical stimuli, and in perception theseimpressions are projected onto the world by a mental mechanism of projec-tion. In things as they are in themselves, secondary properties are merelydispositions to cause the relevant impressions in perceivers. Generalizing thisprojective theory of perception, philosophers were faced with the problemof the external world: how can the perceiving subject know that its impres-sions are really caused by a physical world which exists independently fromthe subject, if, in perception, it only has access to its own impressions andnot to the physical world as it is in itself ? Paradoxically, then, the new scien-tific image of the physical world motivated skeptical doubts concerning thevery existence of that physical world. Kant did not resolve this issue. Hemerely made it more complex by arguing that the things we perceive arephenomenal objects transcendentally constituted by applying various unify-ing transcendental forms to the multiplicity of impressions.

If external world skepticism is essentially based upon (1) the incompati-bility thesis and (2) the ontological primacy of the scientific image, onemight debunk the problem of the external world by demolishing either (1)or (2). Whereas Gilbert Ryle opted for the first strategy in chapter 5 ofDilemmas, called “The World of Science and the Everyday World,”76 Hei-degger may be seen as someone who accepted (1), but rejected (2) by argu-ing that the everyday world is ontologically primary. As Heidegger says,“Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are deter-mined ontologico-categorially.”This second strategy can only succeed, however,if one holds that the physical view of the world is not forced upon us byfactual empirical discoveries. This is precisely what Heidegger argues bothin 1927 and in 1935–36. According to section 69b of Being and Time, scien-tific facts can be ascertained only on the basis of a transcendental schemeprojected upon nature. “In principle, there are no ‘bare facts,’” because “only‘in the light’ of a nature which has been projected in this manner a ‘fact’ canbe found and set up for an experiment regulated and delimited in terms ofthis projection.”77

In What Is a Thing? Heidegger concludes from a similar argument thatthe scientific image of the world is optional. He says that his lectures aim atpreparing a decision (Entscheidung) concerning the question of whether sci-

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ence (die Wissenschaft) really is the measure for knowledge (das Wissen).78 Thisdecision might liberate us “from that which imprisons us most and makes usunfree in our experience and definition of things,” that is, from “modern sci-ence of nature, to the extent that it has become . . . a general form ofthought.”79 However, arguing that the scientific image is optional does notsuffice to ensure the success of Heidegger’s debunking strategy. Heideggerhas to show as well that the scientific image is inadequate as an ontology ofthe world, as he argues in his critique of the Cartesian ontology of matter asres extensa, which is the most explicit version of the scientific image pro-jected during the scientific revolution. In section 21 of Being and Time, Hei-degger says that the Cartesian doctrine not only is ontologically defective(eine ontologische Fehlbestimmung der Welt), but also has led Descartes “to passover [überspringen] both the phenomenon of the world and the Being of thoseentities within-the-world which are proximally ready-to-hand.”80

How does this interpretation of Heidegger’s debunking strategy avoidthe Davidsonian objection? And how can Heidegger be a neo-Kantian tran-scendental philosopher and yet dismiss the problem of the external world asmeaningless? Like Kant, Heidegger assumes in Being and Time that modernphysics is based upon a transcendental structure that is synthetic a priori andthat is a condition for the possibility of constituting scientific facts. In con-tradistinction to Kant, however, Heidegger holds that this transcendentalstructure is an optional projection (Entwurf ), which is projected upon thingsthat are already accessible to us as they are in themselves, to wit, as ready-to-hand(zuhanden). For instance, it is this hammer that we reinterpret in a scientificframework as an occurrent (vorhanden) object, a corporeal thing subject tothe law of gravity.81 If the very same things that are seen as occurrent withinthe framework of modern physics were already accessible beforehand, asthey really are, that is, as the serviceable and meaningful things of ordinarylife, the Davidsonian critique, that the idea of a comprehensive conceptualframework is meaningless because it excludes our articulating what is framedby the framework, is inapplicable.

If we so restrict the transcendental leitmotif to the foundations of physics,and hold that the metaphysical framework of the scientific image is a sec-ondary and optional ontological framework projected upon things that arealready accessible as they are an sich, it is easy to see how Heidegger on theone hand can be a transcendental philosopher and on the other hand canavoid the problem of the external world, or the problem of the Ding an sich.For this problem is meaningless if raised by Dasein in the everyday world,the world as it really is. The problem of the external world arises only onthe basis of the projected framework of Vorhandenheit, to wit, the scientificimage. But as soon as the phenomenologist discovers that this projectedframework is ontologically defective because it passes over (überspringt) the


world as it really is, he grasps that the problem of the external world is aphilosophical delusion. Spelling out the phenomenologico-hermeneuticleitmotif, Heidegger shows why the problem of the external world cannotarise in ordinary life. The transcendental leitmotif is then used for showingthe ontological irrelevance of the context in which the problem does arise,the context of science.

It is only if we misinterpret the world and, consequently, our own onto-logical constitution, by elevating the scientific image to the position of thetrue ontology, that we will take the problem of the external world seriously.This kind of inauthentic interpretation of Dasein and the world is one formof what Heidegger calls Dasein’s falling (Verfallen), the tendency of Daseinto ignore its real nature and to overlook its most authentic possibilities. AsHeidegger says,“the cause [Grund] of this [i.e., of raising the problem of theexternal world] lies in Dasein’s falling and in the way in which the primaryunderstanding of Being has been diverted to Being as occurrentness[Vorhandenheit]—a diversion which is motivated by that falling itself.”82

9. Angst and Transcendental Realism

The thesis of the primacy of readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), spelled outin section 8 as an interpretation of Being and Time, has a number of undis-putable advantages. First, it elegantly solves the interpretative problems ofareas C and D. Second, it links up Being and Time both with Heidegger’searliest writings, not contained in the collected works, in which he de-fended Catholic orthodoxy against individualism and against the scientificconception of the world, and with later works, such as the essay on “TheQuestion Concerning Technology” (“Die Frage nach der Technik”).83 Fi-nally, it clearly shows the extent to which Heidegger and Kant shared thephilosophical strategy of limiting the ontological import of science to aphenomenal world in order to make room for authentic morality, meaning-fulness, and religion in a world an sich. Unfortunately, however, there are se-rious philosophical and textual drawbacks to this interpretation.

From a philosophical point of view, one might dispute Heidegger’s doc-trine that scientific facts depend upon an optional metaphysical framework.Is the idea that science essentially has metaphysical presuppositions, whichare a priori and cannot be tested empirically, not part of an outdated foun-dationalist view of science?84 Can one not reject dubious forms of scientis-tic metaphysics and yet use the best scientific theories now available as aclue to constructing a scientific picture of the world by a consilience of in-ductions, so to say? According to this line of criticism, we should reject Hei-degger’s views if the interpretation of section 8 is historically adequate.

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The problems of textual adequacy are not less serious. The interpretationof section 8 can avoid the Davidsonian critique of transcendental schemesonly if the way in which things are “in themselves,” that is, as ready-to-hand, is not in its turn determined by a comprehensive transcendentalscheme, the framework of the everyday world. But Heidegger seems tothink that the everyday world is such a transcendental framework, and not amere “horizon” in Husserl’s sense. For he uses again and again Kantianphrases when he characterizes what he calls the phenomenon of world. Hesays, for instance, that “the worldhood of the world provides the basis onwhich such entities [to wit: innerweltlich Zuhandenes] can be discovered inthe first place as they are ‘substantially’ ‘in themselves,’” and he speaks of an“‘a priori’ letting-something-be-involved,” which is “the condition for thepossibility of encountering anything ready-to-hand.”85

Even more seriously, it seems that Heidegger holds that, in order to be in-terpreted as ready-to-hand (zuhanden), things have to be already there (vorhan-den). Having written in italics that being ready-to-hand is the way things arein themselves ontologically, he continues as follows:“Yet ‘there is’ somethingready-to-hand only on the basis of something occurrent [Vorhandenem].Does it follow, however, granting this thesis for the nonce, that readiness-to-hand is ontologically founded upon occurrentness?”86

Perhaps it is possible to interpret these last lines as stating the position ofHeidegger’s opponent, a position Heidegger is going to refute later on. Butwhat is worrisome is that there are similar passages elsewhere, which seemto conjure up the specter of the traditional problem of the Ding an sich.These passages would refute Blattner’s interpretation of the transcendentalpoint of view, according to which one cannot discuss or encounter entitiesapart from transcendental schemes. Many authors have drawn our attentionto such passages and Blattner discusses one of them. This is the passage on“world-entry” from the lecture course The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic(Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz; 1928), whereHeidegger says: “World-entry and its happening is the presupposition notfor occurrent entities first becoming occurrent entities and coming intowhat manifests itself to us as their occurrentness and which we understandas such, but rather, merely for occurrent entities announcing themselves pre-cisely in their not needing world-entry with respect to their own being.”87

Heidegger seems to say here that occurrent (vorhanden) entities as such existindependently from the meaningful “world” which is inseparably bound upwith Dasein, and, indeed, independently from all transcendental schemes.88

Blattner’s reaction to this passage in his (1999) book is somewhat sur-prising. He holds that the passage conflicts not only with his interpreta-tion but also with the literal text of Sein und Zeit, that is, with puzzle passage


(3). Blattner says: “However one reads it, p. 212 of Being and Time literallystates that independence (occurrentness) neither is nor is not, when Daseindoes not exist, and also that occurrent entities then neither are nor arenot.”89 The problem with Blattner’s reaction is, that as far as entities are con-cerned, Heidegger does not state this on that page. What Heidegger says is,rather,“When Dasein does not exist . . . it cannot be said that entities are, norcan it be said that they are not.”90 From the facts that when Dasein does notexist it cannot be said that entities are and that it cannot be said that entitiesare not, it does not follow that in that case entities neither are nor are not.Could it be that, according to Heidegger, there is some kind of transcenden-tal access to entities as they are apart from any transcendental scheme, an ac-cess that leaves us speechless and yet shows that at the transcendental level enti-ties exist independently from Dasein and would be there even if Dasein werenot around?

If that were the case, Heidegger could claim on the one hand that with-out Dasein, that is, without a transcendental framework, neither can it besaid that entities are nor can it be said that entities are not, and on the otherhand describe by means of a formal indication ( formale Anzeige) a situationin which entities show up for us even though no transcendental frameworkdetermines as what they show up for us. In such a situation, it would be re-vealed that entities are there (vorhanden) without any framework whatsoever,even though they can only be apprehended as something of some kind (forinstance, as independent from us) within a transcendental framework. TheDavidsonian objection would be avoided, not because we can say what enti-ties are apart from an all-encompassing transcendental scheme, but becausewe can show that they are there apart from all such schemes. Even thoughHeidegger is a transcendental idealist about being, he would be a transcen-dental realist about entities.

One might suggest that this is part of what Heidegger attempts to showin section 40 of Being and Time, the section on the fundamental mood ofanxiety or Angst.91 In contradistinction to fear, Angst is not related to a par-ticular entity within the world. “In anxiety what is environmentally ready-to-hand sinks away, and so, in general, do entities within-the-world.”92 Al-though the entities are still there, they are completely depleted from theirfamiliar everyday significance:“Nothing which is ready-to-hand or occur-rent within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anx-ious. Here the totality of involvements of the ready-to-hand and the occur-rent discovered within-the-world, is, as such, of no consequence; it collapsesinto itself; the world has the character of completely lacking significance.”93

Yet, Heidegger says,“Being-anxious discloses, primordially and directly, theworld as world.”94 So it seems that Heidegger is here discussing the veryphenomenon we are looking for. Because in Angst, the framework of the

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world stops determining as what entities appear to us, the framework as suchis revealed apart from the entities, and the entities are simply there, undeter-mined by the framework, devoid of their familiar significance, revealed intheir “full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other.”95

Heidegger’s description of Angst may be interpreted as showing, then, that heis a transcendental realist concerning entities.96 In Angst,“the original open-ness of entities as such arises: that they are entities—and not nothing.”97

This interpretation of section 40 is compatible with puzzle-passage (3)because in Angst we are speechless. Since the world completely lacks signif-icance, speech (Sprache) is impossible, for according to Heidegger speech ar-ticulates a pre-existing significance. As Heidegger says in his inaugural lec-ture What Is Metaphysics? (Was ist Metaphysik?), of 1929,“Anxiety robs us ofspeech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowdsround, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent.”98 Blattner iscorrect in stressing that if the transcendental framework does not determineas what entities show up for us, it cannot be said that entities are, nor can it besaid that they are not. This is what puzzle passage (3) affirms. But the expe-rience of Angst shows that even in this case entities are still there, albeitwithout having any significance for us. Hence, Blattner is mistaken in con-cluding from puzzle passage (3) that, according to Heidegger, in the absenceof a transcendental framework “entities then neither are nor are not.”

Attributing transcendental realism to Heidegger explains puzzle passage(2): “Entities are, quite independently of the experience by which they aredisclosed, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping inwhich their nature is ascertained. But Being ‘is’ only in the understanding ofthose entities to whose being something like an understanding of Being be-longs.”99 This passage does not refer to occurrent entities only, as is clear fromthe context in section 39 of Being and Time. It refers to all entities, whetherthey are occurrent or ready-to-hand. One might read it as a straightforwardexpression of transcendental realism concerning entities.

This reading of Heidegger as a transcendental realist is compatible withhis debunking strategy concerning the problem of the external world oncondition that we do not confuse Heidegger’s transcendental realism withscientific realism. In the grip of anxiety, Dasein has no reason whatsoever todoubt whether the meaningless entities it is confronted by really exist. Onthe contrary, in the experience of Angst these entities obtrude themselvesupon us in their “full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radi-cally other.”The problem of the external world arises only within the tran-scendental framework of the scientific image, and the ontological adequacyof that framework is denied by Heidegger (section 8, above). Within thetranscendental framework of science, we may be scientific realists in thesense of empirical realists. But at the transcendental level, the experience of


Angst reveals that entities are already there apart from any transcendentalframework, as “the original ground-possibility of both the presentness-at-hand of the theoretical object of science and the readiness-to-hand of theequipment of everyday praxis.”100

For this reason, it is surprising that some interpreters have attributed toHeidegger a robust form of scientific realism, robust in the sense that it is notlimited to an empirical realism in the sense of transcendental philosophy.Dreyfus and Spinosa argue, for example, that “although Heidegger pio-neered the deflationary realist account of the everyday, he sought to estab-lish a robust realist account of science.”101 In order to substantiate this claim,the authors draw attention to Heidegger’s descriptions of the phenomena ofAngst and of the reinterpretation of tools such as a hammer as an object ofscience. But to the extent that Heidegger’s descriptions can be interpretedas scientific realism, it is the empirical realism argued for by Blattner and oth-ers. Dreyfus and Spinosa admit as much when they write that “he [Heideg-ger] has no account of how the meaningless beings revealed by breakdown[and anxiety] can serve as data for science.”102 Even if the authors are rightin arguing that Heidegger would, in principle, have (some of ) the concep-tual resources for developing a robust (transcendental) scientific realism,nothing could be further removed from Heidegger’s real intentions, as hiscritique of scientistic ontologies shows (section 8, above).

10. Conclusions

Having explored some of the complexities of Heidegger’s debunking strat-egy with regard to the problem of the external world, we may now attemptto answer the central question of this chapter: did Heidegger develop a vi-able strategy, by consistently combining phenomenological analysis withtranscendental philosophy? Did he successfully reconcile the “no problem”view with a transcendental view?

In order to obtain consistency, we have to distinguish between three lev-els of analysis in Being and Time and between four different meanings of thenotion of occurrentness (Vorhandenheit).

1. At the most superficial level of analysis, that of empirical realismwith regard to scientific entities, things in the world are inter-preted as occurrent (vorhanden) within the framework of a specifictranscendental scheme. It is at this level that the problem of theexternal world is generated by a scientific metaphysics of nature.Heidegger does not attempt to solve the problem at this level.Rather, he eliminates it by arguing that the scientific level ofanalysis as a whole is ontologically defective, because it passes over

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(überspringt) the real phenomenon of the “world.”A scientificanalysis of natural entities merely decontextualizes entities thatwere already given at a more fundamental level, that is, at level (2).

2. At this more fundamental level, the phenomenological analysis of everyday life reveals that Dasein cannot exist without its world,because it is essentially being-in-the-world. Entities in the every-day world are in themselves (an sich) ready-to-hand (zuhanden), sothat the “reality” of these entities cannot be understood withoutreference to Dasein, whereas Dasein defines itself in terms of, andhence cannot be understood without, these entities in the world.At this level of analysis, the problem of the external world doesnot make sense, and it is discovered that the problem arises onlywithin a projected transcendental framework, the framework ofscience.

3. At an even more fundamental level, revealed in the fundamentalmood of Angst, it is discovered that the world as a comprehensivereferential structure is also a transcendental scheme, and that enti-ties are there (vorhanden) apart from all transcendental schemes, intheir “full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radicallyother.” Since at this level entities cannot be interpreted as some-thing, because the structure of significance (Bedeutsamkeit) hascollapsed, we cannot say anything about entities at this level, apartfrom saying that they are there in their radical otherness. Heideg-ger is a transcendental realist, and not a transcendental agnostic, asBlattner has argued.103

Although Kant could not consistently adopt the hypothesis of a Ding an sichat level (3), because he was a strong transcendentalist (interpretation [b] ofsection 5, above), Heidegger can put forward the phenomenological thesisof transcendental realism without inconsistency, because he is a weak tran-scendentalist with regard to being (interpretation [c]), and because he holdsthat one can experience things at the transcendental level in Angst. In otherwords, Heidegger escapes by means of his analysis of Angst from Schulze’sverdict that any attempt to transcend the limits of possible experience by atranscendental philosophy is condemned by this very same transcendentalphilosophy. At the transcendental level (3), things are occurrent (vorhanden),but the problem of the external world does not arise, as we saw above.

We may say that relative to empirical level (1), level (2) is a transcendentallevel, and that relative to level (2), level (3) is a transcendental level, the ulti-mate transcendental level. Heidegger is a “realist” at all levels, but his “real-ism” does not have the same meaning as the various realisms that allegedlysolve the problem of the external world. At levels (1) and (2), Heidegger


holds that “along with Dasein as Being-in-the-world, entities within-the-world have in each case already been disclosed.”“This existential-ontologi-cal assertion seems to accord with the thesis of realism that the externalworld is really occurrent,” because it does not deny or doubt that entities areoccurrent. But the agreement is a “merely doxographical” one, for Heideg-ger’s “realism” at all levels presupposes the ontology of Dasein, which showsthat the problem of the external world is meaningless.104

In contradistinction to the term zuhanden, the word vorhanden is not aHeideggerian archaism or neologism.105 This may explain the fact that Hei-degger uses the term vorhanden (“occurrent”) loosely and in a number ofdifferent senses. In the widest sense, it just means “being there,” and in thissense even Dasein is vorhanden.106 In a second sense, which is somewhatmore restricted, everything except Dasein is vorhanden, as we discover in thefundamental mood of Angst.107 Third, Heidegger uses the word vorhandenfor things as they show up within the world even if they do not fit into theframework of Vorhandenheit in the fourth and narrowest sense. So he says,for instance, that “not all occurrentness is the occurrentness of things. The‘nature’ that ‘envelops’ us consists of course of entities-in-the-world, but itexhibits neither the mode of Being of readiness-to-hand nor that of occur-rentness in the sense of ‘natural entities.’”108 Fourth, Vorhandenheit is the par-ticular transcendental framework within which things show up for us asmerely there, devoid of practical significance. This is Heidegger’s technicaland narrowest sense of the term vorhanden. Sometimes, but not always, hedifferentiates between this fourth sense of Vorhandenheit and a scientific wayof envisaging things. In section 69b of Being and Time, for instance, Heideg-ger wonders whether “a scientific attitude has already constituted itself onlybecause, instead of deliberating circumspectively about something ready-to-hand, we ‘take’ it as something occurrent.”109

Although Heidegger’s strategy for debunking the problem of the exter-nal world can be made consistent in this manner, one may doubt whether itis philosophically fruitful. Those who consider Being and Time as an indis-pensable antidote to the dominance of scientific thought in our culture, willwelcome Heidegger’s ontological disqualification of science. But those whohold with Quine, Dreyfus, and Spinosa, the Churchlands, and many others,that scientific thought is the best access to things as they are in themselves,will reject this disqualification. Since the ontological disqualification of sci-ence is the crucial move in Heidegger’s debunking strategy, the latter partywill have to develop another attitude vis-à-vis the problem of the externalworld. One may either propose a solution to it or argue that one should ac-cept the best scientific theories without endorsing the scientistic meta-physics that generated the problem in the first place.110

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1. Being as a “MacGuffin”

In his famous interviews with François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock insistedthat while many of his thrillers concerned some piece of information or ob-ject around which swirled all the intrigue and energy of the film, it didn’tmatter if that object was never identified, that it could even turn out to benothing at all, of no serious importance in itself.1 Borrowing from someKipling stories, he called such an elusive object of attention a “MacGuffin,”and went on to say,“My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean the emptiest,the most nonexistent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in North byNorthwest. . . . Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to itspurest expression: nothing at all.”2 In 1987, the great intellectual historianHans Blumenberg, in a supremely backhanded compliment, noted the ef-fectiveness of Heidegger’s “question about the meaning of Being” in func-tioning in just this Hitchcockean way. In a clever rejoinder to Heidegger,Blumenberg titled his article,“Das Sein—Ein MacGuffin,” thereby deliber-ately invoking Hitchcock’s own description of the MacGuffin, “boileddown to its purest expression: nothing at all.”3

The cleverness of this invocation of the nothingness of the HeideggerianMacGuffin, Sein, derives from the enormous if infamous and elusive impor-tance that Heidegger himself ascribes to “the nothing,” das Nichts. The ap-peals to das Nichts and die Nichtigkeit occur just when Being and Time beginsto indicate how we should understand the meaning of Dasein’s very being

chapter

Necessary Conditions for the Possibility of What Isn’t

heidegger on failed meaning

Robert B. Pippin

13

as, in a way,“nothing at all.” Here is Heidegger from Division Two of Beingand Time.

Care itself, in its very essence, is permeated (durchsetzt) with nullity (Nichtigkeit)through and through. Thus “care”—Dasein’s Being—means, as thrown projection,Being-the-basis-of-a-nullity (and this being-the-basis is itself null) [Das nichtigeGrundsein einer Nichtigkeit]. This means that Dasein as such is guilty, if our formallyexistential definition of “guilt” as “Being-the-basis-of-a-nullity” is indeed correct.4

Blumenberg is suggesting in effect, with King Lear, that “nothing comes fromnothing,” and that Heidegger’s picture of Dasein’s Angst-ridden realization ofits own nullity should be taken as a revelation about the emptiness and mis-leading quality of the question (or worse, of Heidegger’s fanciful analysis), notas the manifestation of the existential abyss. The idea is clearly that while thecreation of the expectation of a “comprehensive meaning” (an unnecessaryand artificial requirement in Blumenberg’s view) is vital to the possibility ofthe Heideggerian narration of a person’s life (or in Heidegger’s terms vital tobeing able to “temporalize” (zeitigen) temporality, the supreme “condition” ofmeaningfulness), and while the intimation of a profoundly elusive, almostnecessarily absent meaning may best of all fulfill a dramatic need (somethingthat preserves what Heidegger calls a complete Unabgeschlossenheit, un-closed-ness, incompleteness, in Dasein’s existence), at some point such an expectationis more a dramatic trick than anything else. The “meaning of Being expecta-tion” is already such a trick, Blumenberg suggests, and is in reality nothing atall, in the ordinary not Heideggerian sense of “there’s nothing to it.”

This is a bit of a cheap shot, not as cheap as Carnap’s famous swipes in“The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,”5

but unfair nonetheless. However, understanding just why it is unfair, andhow the appeal to das Nichts functions in Heidegger’s early philosophy, andespecially why the question opens up for Heidegger distinctly philosophicalissues (not issues of psychological health, historical diagnosis, social theory,or literary mood), will require several steps.

2.The Question of Being

First, it is important to stress that Heidegger’s understanding of the Seinsfrageis that it is directed toward what he frequently calls the “meaning of Being”(Sinn des Seins).6 A typical programmatic statement in Being and Time,“Basi-cally, all ontology . . . remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, ifit has not already first clarified the meaning of being, and conceived thisclarification as its fundamental task.”7 In his 1936–37 Nietzsche lecturesHeidegger characterizes the “decisive question” at the end of Western phi-losophy as “the question about the meaning of Being, not only about the

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Being of beings”; and, he goes on,“‘meaning’ (Sinn) is thereby delimited inits concept as that whence and on the basis of which Being in general assuch can be revealed and come into truth (in die Wahrheit kommen).”8 Thisseems pretty clearly to say that the “clarification” spoken of in Being andTime was of the “possibility” of the meaning of being at all, rather than anydirect answer to the question.9 It is hard to exaggerate the scope of thisquestion as Heidegger understands it, since it seems to cover the intelligibil-ity, deep existential familiarity, of someone uttering noises at me, of inkmarks on a page, of having to make breakfast, seeing that someone is angrywith me, or facing a decision about whether to volunteer for a mission. Theissue, he keeps stressing, is not what there is, what the basic kinds are, oreven (as in the Introduction to Metaphysics) why there is something and notnothing.10 The question concerns the very possibility of intelligibility at all,how it is that sense can ever be made of anything, that there could be aLichtung, a clearing or lighting or Unverborgenheit that “happens,” such that a“sense” of being is possible.11

Now a formulation like “whence and on the basis of which Being ingeneral as such can be revealed and come into truth,” since it looks verymuch like a question about the “conditions necessary” for the possibility ofany “meaning of Being,” seems a project in the tradition of transcendentalphilosophy, or part of a post-Kantian heritage. Despite his protestations inGrundprobleme that his own concept of transcendental truth “does not coin-cide without further ado with the Kantian,”12 and his criticism of Being andTime in the Nietzsche lectures as too transcendental in the Kantian sense,13

Heidegger certainly takes up what seems the language of transcendentalphilosophy. “By ‘existentiality’ we understand the state of Being that is con-stitutive for those entities that exist.”14 The hermeneutic of Dasein becomesa hermeneutic “in the sense of working out the conditions on which the pos-sibility of any ontological investigation depends.”15 And most directly: “Butin significance [Bedeutsamkeit] itself, with which Dasein is always familiar,there lurks the ontological condition which makes it possible for Dasein, assomething which understands and interprets, to disclose such things as ‘sig-nificances’ [Bedeutungen]; upon these in turn is founded the Being of wordsand language.”16 There is even what has sounded to some like transcendentalidealist language:“Dasein only has meaning. . . . Hence only Dasein can bemeaningful (sinnvoll) or meaningless (sinnlos).”17 “Only as long as Dasein is(that is only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible), ‘isthere’ Being.”18 And even:“All truth is relative to Dasein’s being.”19 Heideg-ger is certainly clear that in such passages he is not talking about phenome-nalism or subjective idealism. Even though “Reality is referred back to thephenomenon of care,” this does not mean that “only when Dasein exists andas long as Dasein exists, can the Real be as that which in itself it is.”20 Or,

Heidegger on Failed Meaning 201

“Being (not entities) is dependent upon the understanding of Being; that isto say, Reality (not the Real) is dependent upon care.”21 And all commen-tators on Heidegger can cite his famous realism in section 44. “What is tobe demonstrated is not an agreement of knowing with its object, still less ofthe psychical with the physical; but neither is it an agreement between ‘con-tents of consciousness’ among themselves. What is to be demonstrated issolely the being-uncovered [Entdeckt-sein] of the entity itself—that entity inthe how of its uncoveredness.”22 It is clear from the literature on this issue inHeidegger that passages with such realist and such idealist implications, suchtranscendental and more traditionally ontological implications, could beproduced at great length. The talk of “dependence” still, though, at leastsuggests some sort of a “dependence of sense,” if not existence dependence,in the roughly transcendental or “condition for the possibility” meaning.23

Such “uncovering” or disclosedness as discussed above obviously can’t hap-pen without us (although that does not mean it happens to or for us in anystraightforward sense, and since the phenomena Heidegger is interested inare “hidden,” his version of phenomenology is also a hermeneutics),24 andnothing Heidegger says in section 44 undermines or contradicts the depen-dence claim in general. (The entity in its uncoveredness, or being in its dis-closedness, is not the entity “itself,” or being, directly apprehended; there is a“how” of uncoveredness; a distinct event of disclosedness. Or, it seems nat-ural to frame the issue as John Haugeland has: that ontological disclosednessis a condition for the possibility of comportment toward entities as entities,of ontic truth.)25

In terms of Heidegger’s project, though, we can see straightaway bothwhat the first question would be if his enterprise were to be consideredtranscendental, and that the absence of any concern for such a question al-ready reveals that he conceives of his project somewhat differently. Thequestion would be: why should Dasein’s requirements for intelligibility—what being could come to mean for Dasein—have anything to do with “theintelligibles” as such, with what being could possibly mean? There is no im-mediately obvious reason not to believe, with Nietzsche, that what wecount as intelligibility is the perspectival expression of the will to power, orwith Foucault that there are no power-neutral accounts of such sense mak-ing.26 (Indeed, in his famous Abbau, Heidegger himself makes similar claimsabout the “hybris” and subjectivism of all metaphysics.) Or, suppose: as far aswe can make it out, Dasein must be understood as “ontologically unique.” Isthis because we lack the intellectual resources to understand Dasein as, say,a sophisticated machine, or, despite appearances, as ontologically continuouswith other mammals, or because Dasein in itself cannot be such an object orsuch a kind, and this is so in a way not dependent on what we could makesense of ?


The direct answer to such questions would be what Kant called a tran-scendental deduction, and so a demonstration that the “conditions for thepossibility of experience” are, must be,“at the same time the conditions forthe possibility of objects of experience” (that what “we” require for beingto have meaning is what is required for being itself to have any possiblemeaning). But such a deduction in anything like its Kantian form wouldrequire an appeal to pure forms of intuition or something analogous (some-thing outside “the space of the conceptual,” or outside the requirements ofthe subject, yet accessible to philosophy) and (to make a very long storyvery, very short) by the middle of the nineteenth century, such an appealhad become largely moot, and there is no indication of such a strategy inBeing and Time.27

The absence of that or any analogous argument form in Being and Timesuggests something like the approach already manifest in Hegel, but which inHeidegger results from his famous break with Husserlian phenomenology.That is, we begin from an original denial of any possible separability of con-ceptual and material, intuitional elements in any philosophical account ofexperience in the first place and so an insistence that we did not need to crossany divide between “our conditions for intelligibility” and “the intelligible,”and do not need to deduce how our requirements for intelligibility might besaid to “fit” what we are independently given. The question itself should berejected, not answered.28 In fact, in his Davos encounter with Cassirer and inhis Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik)shortly thereafter, Heidegger presses his account of the finitude of Dasein—the absence of a formal point of view from which to secure any sort ofphilosophical necessity, even transcendental necessity—to the point of trans-forming Kant’s Critique into his own existential analytic. (Of course, Heideg-ger’s name for his version of the inseparability thesis is in-der-Welt-sein, being-in-the-world, or, eventually, Geschichtlichkeit, historicality.)

There is, for example, no argument by Heidegger that purports to investi-gate what a meaningful engagement with entities and others would be like,were there not some comprehensive “horizon” of significance, or some ori-entation from the meaning of Dasein’s being, and thereby to try to show thatsuch a putative situation is not really possible. He does not do this becausehe does not consider the relation between such a comprehensive horizonand determinate intelligibility as that between necessary condition and con-ditioned, a fact that is dramatically manifest in the possibility that the existen-tial function of such a comprehensive horizon can pass into “forgetfulness”(without any ontic “senselessness”).29

And we should keep in mind our main topic: in Heidegger’s account weare headed toward some sort of claim that whatever conditions we mightestablish, they can, in some way, fail. “Care” is the meaning of the being of


Dasein, and the entire interrelational structure of the world of Care can failso catastrophically that Dasein will appear not as the world-embedded,open-to-meaning, engaged agent in a shared world that it is, but, all at onceas it were, the null basis of a nullity. (Or, to anticipate an even more radicalchallenge: Dasein is, at the same time, both.) Wherever Heidegger’s Kantiantalk might lead us, we have to keep in mind how bizarre it would sound torefer to some sort of “breakdown” in the constitutive-conditioning functionof the experience-enabling categories of causality or substance.

But where does this leave us with respect to our question: what sort ofquestion is the Seinsfrage and how might one go about answering it? It isnot, we should now conclude, a transcendental question in Kant’s sense (ofthe sort that might require a deduction), and Heidegger seems to adopt the“inseparability” thesis about subject and object, concept and intuition, Da-sein and world, but (to make another very long story very short) withoutthe phenomenological reduction, bracketing, and abstracting that might leadus back to a claim of Husserlian philosophical necessity.30 So we seem leftwithout any distinctly philosophical claims, except negative ones. We mightbe tempted to conclude that, if Dasein is, in some radical sense, thrown pro-jection, always already embedded in its world, if any possible meaning ofbeing is existential in just this sense, then there is nothing to say about whatit is to be so thrown except insofar as any such answer is “attested” in the ex-perience of such subjects, in a historical world, at a time.

There is a sense in which, properly understood, making such a claim iswhat fundamental ontology consists in. But everything comes down to“properly understood,” and we are therewith in the vicinity of one of Hei-degger’s deepest anxieties: that this radical doctrine of finitude, a finitudethat makes the adoption of a transcendental interpretation of Heideggerquite misleading, will be misinterpreted as the invitation to a historicistphilosophical anthropology, a mere hermeneutics of what being has come tomean; radical only in that considerations of how anything could come tomean are included within the hermeneutic, not treated independently, prior(that is, transcendentally). Another of his anxieties also lurks in this area: thathe is an “existentialist,” for whom the horrible truth about the “meaning-lessness” or “absurdity” of Dasein’s existence is too horrible to face, it pro-vokes despair, and so on. I think Heidegger is right that both characteriza-tions are inaccurate.

That is, both transcendentalist and existentialist interpretations are hardto make consistent with the fact that Heidegger is manifestly not talkingabout the finitude and mortality and self-obscuring characteristics of Daseinon the one hand, and on the other hand some considerably more than finitecapacity on the part of philosophy to set out the necessary conditions al-ways required for anything to make sense for such a finite being, or to state


the “real” truth about Dasein’s “absurd” existence. Finitude, the consequencesof Heidegger’s criticism of standard logic, of Husserlian phenomenology andKantian transcendentalism, and eventually of all metaphysics, is primarily acritique, one might even say an attack, on philosophy itself, not a reminder thatwe all die and are afraid of that or cannot face the absurdity of our lives.31

(As early as 1920 Heidegger was writing,“We philosophize, not in order toshow that we need a philosophy, but instead precisely to show that we do notneed one.”)32 Avoiding though the transcendental or historicist anthropologyor existentialist interpretations has everything to do with the radicality ofHeidegger’s account of das Nichts, to which I now turn.

3. Being and the Nothing

Heidegger presents an existential analytic that is proposed as preliminary, astalking horse such that progress in understanding the meaning of Dasein’sbeing could be the decisive step in understanding any Sinn des Seins (“mean-ing of being”) for Dasein. Again, this approach creates a transcendentaltemptation, as if we are looking for Dasein’s conditions of sense, conditionsthat will set the horizon for the possibility of all sense (even though still “forDasein”). But I want to suggest that the Dasein analytic is privileged becauseit is exemplary (exemplary of how the meaning of being “happens”), not tran-scendental in this sense (not constitutive of any possible meaning, as if “neces-sary conditions” have been found). To see how this works, we need to re-mind ourselves briefly of the drama that makes Being and Time so riveting.

The catchphrase associated with Heidegger and Sartre, “existence pre-cedes essence,” amounts, minimally, to a denial that any distinctively human“way of life” could be said to have an anthropologically fixed, or essential,or socially “assigned” nature.33 Rather, one existence is always in a kind ofsuspended state, everywhere oriented and “lived forward” by some predis-cursive understanding of and commitment to a “meaning of one’s being”that cannot have something like a resolution or totality or a fixed “ground-ing” in the usual sense.34

And, Heidegger notes, Dasein can “decide its existence by taking hold orneglecting.”35 In the historical world Heidegger interprets (that is, ourworld), it is the latter that mostly manifests how Dasein is at issue for itself,by neglecting in some way the call of conscience, calling one back to one-self as a concernful being-in-the-world, living a life only by “taking up thereins,” only by leading one’s life, but constantly “falling,” lost in the concernsof das Man, attempting to avoid the claims of such a requirement. Dasein’sbeing is said to “lie hidden,” but in a way such that that “hiddenness also be-longs to what thus shows itself.”36 And in the most dialectical expression, theIch or I can exist as “not-I,” in the mode of having lost Ichheit (“I-ness”), or


is only by having lost itself (Selbstverlorenheit).37 (And it is already importantto note, contra the “existentialist” reading: this does not mean a simplefalling away from an authentic selfhood, to which we may resolutely return.The point is the more radical claim that the “Ich’s” capacity to exist as Selb-stverlorenheit “is” what it is to be an “I” at all. Achieving some sort of stable“Ichheit” would be to cease to be an “Ich.”)

This account sets the stage for the sort of philosophical question aboutmeaning Heidegger wants to pose. For the question he wants to ask is not askeptical one (either about other minds, the external world, or the very pos-sibility of a distinction between knowing and not-knowing at all), and notan idealist worry (what the relation is between the conditions for our un-derstanding the meaning of our being and what being could be), and not anethical one (how Dasein can remain “true” to itself ), but a different ques-tion: what could meaning—“fundamentally,” preeminently the meaning ofbeing—be, such that it could fail, utterly, and in a way absolutely fail? This sort oforientation (examining the nature of significance, meaningfulness in ourengagements with others and the world, by taking our bearings from abreakdown in meaningful practices) had been methodologically prominentfrom the very first accounts of being-in-the-world. The “worldly” characterof the world itself (Weltlichkeit), not just aspects of the world or items in theworld, is announced by, perhaps even consists in, such breakdowns as “con-spicuousness” (Auffallen), “obtrusiveness” (Aufdringlichkeit), and “obstinacy”(Aufsässigkeit), each a kind of “break” (Bruch) in the referential contexts withinwhich Zuhandenheit makes the kinds of sense it does. No regressive tran-scendental argument to necessary conditions of sense is involved in such amaking-manifest; Heidegger is appealing instead to the phenomenologicalevidence of “attestation” (Bezeugung), what “shows itself ” in such experi-ences of breakdown as having been at work.

Moreover the sort of significance Heidegger is interested in as a matter offundamental ontology is hardly limited to the dealings and engagements in-volved in the equipmental world of sense. Dasein’s being is,“fundamentallyontologically,” care, its “circumspection” always “concernful.”The meaning-fulness of its engagements with objects and others involves a layered relationof ends,“for the sakes of which” (Worumwillen) in Heidegger’s nominaliza-tion.38 Even if the directedness and normative commitments that, as Dreyfusnotes,39 sustain our comportment in the world “non-robotically” are notself-referential mental states, this directedness is sustained, which is evidentwhen that sustaining fails, when, in the simplest sense, care fails: when wecannot care. That is, the accounts of everyday significance and of the mean-ingfulness of being are treated as matters of mattering. The prethematic on-tological horizon of sense “held open” by Dasein is a horizon of mattering,


with saliences of significance and ordered relations of importance always atissue if not directly “pointed at” or aimed at or consciously attended to, insuch engagements. It can be best seen as that sort of sense, mattering, whenwe experience the distinctiveness of its failure, something Heidegger firstbegins to describe in his account of anxiety.

There he begins to explore this unusual “logos of mattering” with a re-mark that is not given the usual headline treatment but is astonishingnonetheless. For Heidegger notes an experience rarely treated beforeKierkegaard’s thinking on despair, and rarely treated anywhere as being ofsuch consequence. “The totality of involvements [Bewandtnisganzheit] of theready-to-hand and the present-at-hand discovered within the world is, assuch, of no consequence [ohne Belang]; it collapses into itself; the world hasthe character of completely lacking significance [die Welt hat den Charaktervölliger Unbedeutsamkeit].”40 Is such a thought even thinkable? Complete in-significance? The totality of involvements of the Zuhanden and Vorhanden“collapses into itself ”? It is not until Heidegger revisits in Division Two theissues here introduced that both the existential dimensions of such an expe-rience and its importance for fundamental ontology emerge. Having notedthat any full account of the meaning of Dasein’s being must take account ofDasein as possibly a totality or whole, Heidegger argues that Dasein cannever be such a whole, but its own total significance can come into view bybeing toward its end, indeed an ending that constantly threatens Dasein’svery being. He asks,“How is it existentially possible for this constant threatto be genuinely disclosed? All understanding is accompanied by state-of-mind. Dasein’s mood brings it face-to-face with the thrownness of its ‘thatit is there.’ But the state of mind which can hold open the utter and con-stant threat to itself arising from Dasein’s ownmost individualized being isanxiety.”41 This is the preparation for Heidegger’s extraordinary account of“freedom towards death” and his summary account of care as “shot through”with Nichtigkeit, and Dasein being the null basis of a nothingness.

Heidegger at this point allows himself a no doubt deliberately comic un-derstatement when he then notes,“the ontological meaning of the notness[Nichtheit] of this existential nothingness is still obscure.”42 But what he triesto stress throughout his extended account of conscience, care, guilt, and au-thenticity is the radicality of the failure of meaning provoked by the conflictbetween any sense-making, care-ful engagement, and defeat of such attemptsin the face of the absoluteness of one’s death.What he describes is a collapseof significance that allows us to see that what had “kept up” such a struc-ture of significance was “nothing” but our caring to keep it in place, a careoriginating and failing in utter contingency. The unincorporability of one’s death into this structure of significance, or of mattering, the impossibility


that death could mean anything, brings into experiential prominence thecontingency of care itself, the escape or flight from such a nullity withoutwhich leading an existence, temporalizing a time, would not be possible. Hisclaim seems to be that the experience of the constant impendingness ofone’s death can “block” in some way the practical projection into the futurethat amounts to the work of sustaining meaning for Dasein. Such an expe-rience does not cause such a breakdown, nor is it merely the occasion forsuch a reaction. Heidegger must mean that the sustaining of such meaningrequires the fulfilling of an existential condition, a sense of futurity, a being-toward-an-end, that the absoluteness and arbitrariness of death calls intoquestion (“calls” as the call of conscience). The idea is not that death itselfis unintelligible or absurd, but what being-toward death calls into questionreveals that what it means to be Dasein is to be able to fail to be a “con-cernful,” circumspective “site” of meaning, and that the succeeding and fail-ing cannot be a part of Dasein’s project, cannot be assigned to it as a task, awork. (This begins the difference with Hegel, whose position I want laterto bring in as a contrast.)

A short time later, in his lecture course of 1929–30, Heidegger focuses ona Stimmung that reveals a failure or collapse of meaning that is intuitivelyclearer but less intuitively connected with responsive action or redemption.He notes as an ontological phenomenon the possibility of “deep boredom”(tiefe Langeweile). The “emptiness” evinced in such a profound or deep bore-dom (die langweilende Leere) is not the sort one can will or argue oneself outof, not the sort of orientation one can control.43 (It should be stressed herethat Heidegger’s variations in appeals to various “Stimmungen,” or moods,attunements, means that his analysis is not restricted to any particular expe-rience of death. He is looking for paradigmatic cases where the whole inter-related practical structure of care can,“on its own” as it were, fail; and thento ask what such meaning must be that it could fail.)

And of course Heidegger is not trying to say that the fact of one’s in-evitable death gives one a reason to lose faith in the worth or point of one’sprojects and goals. In the first place the character of the significance ormeaning he takes to be threatened is, in his terms, “prior” to any belief orproject. What fails is care, and this precisely not for any reason. (One mustalready care about reasons for that to be a possibility, and in that case themattering of reasons would not fail.) It fails because nothing matters in iso-lation from whatever else matters, and Heidegger thinks there must be someprimordial horizon of significance for such care to be sustained (the kind ofprimordial horizon that comes into view when the problem of Dasein’s to-tality is in question). What is important in this context is that the practicalimplication of this failure is what Heidegger calls “guilt,” an owning up


both to the radical contingency of one’s thrownness and the inescapabilityof an ever threatening death, as well as to the practical necessity, in acting atall, of fleeing in some way from such nullity, of “erring” in the ontologicalsense in order to be, in order to “stretch one’s existence along in time.”Thisincompatibility is not a rational inconsistency or a failure to be rationalenough. We are simply not “in charge” of whether care fails or not, or howto think our way into or out of such an experience. “This ‘Being-a-basis’means never to have power over one’s ownmost being from the ground up.This ‘not’ belongs to the existential meaning of thrownness.”44 And,“being-guilty is more primordial than any knowledge of it.”45

This is the predecessor account for all attempts—eventually Carnap’stoo—to tame or moderate the existential and ontological challenge of not-being.46 But our own not-being, is not another way for us to be, we are notsomething other than alive when we are dead. Death is also not a naturalcompletion, or ripeness, or the lack or privation of life in a material body; itis not—existentially, with respect to Dasein’s experience of the meaning ofits being—even a factual “event” to be expected and has its role in such ameaning question only by our “being-toward” it. And, as Heidegger nevertires of saying, the ontological problem of not-being cannot be reduced tothe problem of a logical operator, the paradigmatic form of treating not-be-ing as otherness; not this being, but thereby some other being or some otherpossible point in logical space. This is the sense of the famous passage fromWhat Is Metaphysics? (Was ist Metaphysik?) that so enraged Carnap:

Does the nothing exist only because the not, i.e. negation exists? Or is it the otherway around? Do negation and the not exist only because the nothing exists? . . . Weassert: the nothing is prior to the not and the negation. . . . Where do we seek thenothing? How do we find the nothing? . . . Anxiety reveals the nothing. That forwhich and because of which we were anxious was “really” nothing. Indeed: thenothing itself—as such—was present. . . . What about this nothing?—The nothingitself nothings.47

(Even here, it is important to stress, Heidegger is tying this so-called “refer-ence to the Nothing” to anxiety, or the failure of possible “projection.” Heis always referring, I think, to the unique Dasein-possibility—failed “livedmeaning”—not to any metaphysical nonmeaning.) Death, Heidegger issuggesting, is not simply the negation of life, other than life (but some otherstate of being). For Dasein qua Dasein (not qua biological organism) is al-ways “dying,”48 always in a way “at” its end, and for it, ceasing to be is an ab-solute nothingness, the meaning of which cannot captured by the negationoperation applied to “life.” Heidegger goes to an extreme formulation to tryto suggest that such radical not-being cannot be domesticated by us, is not


the result of what we do to ourselves, bring about in some psychologicalsense—his infamous phrase is “the nothing itself nothings”—but his con-trast is clear enough.49

From a Heideggerian point of view, in other words, when Creon andAntigone in Sophocles’ play are arguing over what is to be done withPolyneices’ body, when the audience is made aware of the utter differencebetween Polyneices and the thing now rotting thing outside the city walls,they are enacting what they must enact in order to live, even though both“mediations,” both appeals to the Penates on the one hand and the city’s re-quirements on the other, are attempts to reclaim, within a logic of matter-ing, what cannot make sense in this way; both represent in ways typical ofsuch human flight a refusal to allow Polyneices to die. There is no way tocontinue to stretch along into the future the world that had Polyneices in it.He is not in it at all; he is nothing; and when in some contingent way thestructure of care fails to continue such redemption, the character of such anattempt, its ultimate Nichtigkeit, becomes unavoidable.

Such a failure of meaning is radical in ways now more familiar frommodern literature.50 When Bartleby the Scrivener stops working, and“prefers not to,” what is “uncanny” (in exactly the Heideggerian sense)about his story is that the failure of meaning he suffers is not in the name ofwhat his form of life lacks, what it should have; not in the name of any ab-sence or privation, any “other than what now is.”The failure of meaningappears to be complete, not a response to the failure of humanism, of jus-tice, not a response to the brutality of wage labor and so forth. Bartleby hasin effect no “everyday” psychology (none Melville gives as relevant), no be-liefs or aspirations, no reasons. Mattering just “fails” in the way it can (theway it can fundamentally in anxious being-toward-death), in the way that re-veals the utter contingency and fragility of it succeeding when it does. Its happeningor not happening is the event of truth (the occasion for living “in truth”).The “disturbance” that Bartleby provokes in his colleagues is very much as ifhe is the presence of death among then, the “uncanniest” of guests. In thesame way that the nihilistic culmination of metaphysics reveals somethingabout the nature of metaphysics as such, and is not a contingent event—philosophers losing faith in metaphysics—so too in the existential situationit is the radicality of this failure of meaning that reveals what is most essen-tial about such meaning (that it can so fail). Any partial or determinate fail-ure (of the kind central to Hegel’s account of conceptual and social change,for example) amounts merely to an extension of sense-making practices andso blocks any radical reflection on their possibility. (“Only by the anticipa-tion of death is every accidental and ‘provisional’ possibility driven out.”)51

But there are no determinate conditions necessary for care to succeed, to


be sustained, for anything to matter, such that to call the call of conscience,anxiety, and being-toward-death a threat to the existential satisfaction oftranscendental conditions is to obscure the point Heidegger is trying tomake.52 There is no way that being-in-the-world can be isolated from itshistorical incarnations so that we might isolate “conditions” necessary for thepragmata of the world to make the sort of determinate practical sense theyoccasionally do. Heidegger’s accounts of involvement, comportment, falling,and so forth are both (1) primordial elements of how things have come tomake sense in a historical world (such that the gradual transformation ofsuch a world into one wherein a predatory technological subject confrontsmaterial stuff for its mundane purposes is not a failure or breakdown ofsense, but the contingent transformation of the horizon of ontologicalmeaning), and (2) preparatory to the account of the failure of such a way ofthings mattering when the call of conscience and its attendant anxiety bringthe practical structure of care crashing down. Again, Kantian or transcenden-tal conditions cannot “fail.”That is the whole point of the case for their ne-cessity. The Heideggerian elements of practical sense making can ultimatelyfail or even be permanently forgotten.That is the whole point of saying thatCare is shot through with Nightigkeit and is the null basis of a nullity. Thisfailure, occasioned by the “threat” to meaning posed by one’s ever-impend-ing death, is not a failure “as yet” to make the proper sense of what seemswithout sense.53 There is no horrible fate that we are too fearful or too finiteto make sense of.The failure Heidegger is trying to account for is not a fail-ure to “make sense” of death, but an occasion in which the failure to makesense of, be able to sustain reflectively, sense making itself “happens.”

This situation, I have claimed, is an exemplary, not a transcendental, ac-count. Of what is it exemplary? In existential terms (in Heidegger’s sense ofexistential) it exemplifies the occasion requiring either an “authentic” or“inauthentic” response, an issue that would require several volumes to dis-cuss appropriately. But the basic direction of the book’s analysis suggests theobvious answer: what is exemplified is the temporal character of being, thatbeing is time, the truth of the meaning of being historical, a matter ofGeschichtlichkeit. I close with some brief remarks about that sort of claimand temporality itself.

4.Time and Historicality

I have said that for Heidegger mattering can just “fail,” and in a way that re-veals the utter contingency and fragility of it succeeding when it does, so thatmeaning happening or not happening is the event of truth (the occasion forliving “in truth,” in the acknowledgment of this finitude or in flight from it).


There is another way to put this point, once we take in Heidegger’s mostcomprehensive account of care, his way of making the point cited earlier—that care must be sustained to function as care, stretched along into the future.Heidegger’s formulation is that “temporality [Zeitlichkeit] reveals itself as themeaning of authentic care,”54 and the “primordial unity of the structure ofcare lies in temporality.”This is the opening to what he calls “a more pri-mordial insight into the temporalization structure of temporality, which re-veals itself as the historicality [Geschichtlichkeit] of Dasein.”55 This distinctivehistoricality (or historicity as it is now more frequently translated) is stressedby Heidegger in a way not entirely clear in the Macquarrie-Robinsontranslation.

The movement [actually this is another neologism, more like “moved-ness” or“motility,” Bewegtheit] of existence is not the motion [Bewegung] of something pre-sent-at-hand. It is definable in terms of the way Dasein stretches along [aus der Er-steckung des Daseins].The specific movement [Bewegtheit] in which Dasein is stretchedalong and stretches itself along, we call its happening [Geschehen, “historizing” byMacquarrie and Robinson].56

However valuable it is to draw attention to the etymological connectionsbetween Geschehen and Geschichte, it is crucial that the translation capturethe sense of contingency connoted by Geschehen, and especially regrettablethat the translators often make Geschehen a verb when Heidegger uses it as anoun, suggesting just the opposite of what Heidegger wants to suggest—themere “happenstance,” let us say, of meaning as a temporalizing, care-ful en-gagement, and the happenstance of its failure.57 So the summary claim thathe makes should be,“This is how we designate Dasein’s primordial happen-ing [ursprüngliche Geschehen], lying in its authentic resoluteness, and in whichDasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it hasinherited and yet has chosen.”58

There is a lot packed into such claims, but the basic dimensions of thecase attributed to Heidegger are visible. What is meaning such that it canfail? Finite, contingent; a Geschehen, distinctively temporal, in a way a kindof event, Er-eignis (or “e-vent” as it is sometimes translated to capture Hei-degger’s hyphen), which can happen to us, or not, cannot be redeemed orreflectively grounded by philosophy.

This Geschehen quality also differentiates Heidegger’s position from thatother Southwest German philosopher, and that can be a final way to makethe Heideggerian point. I quote from the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenologyof Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes):

But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself un-touched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. Itwins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment [Zerrissenheit], it finds itself. . . .


Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.This tarrying [Verweilen] with the negative is the magical power [Zauberkraft] thatconverts it into being.59

This claim is possible in Hegel’s account because such instances of failure,breakdowns in a form of life as a whole, “utter dismemberment,” are pre-cisely not mere “happenings” or events, and so not instances of radical non-being. As he notes in the introduction,

Thus consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands: it spoils its own limited sat-isfaction. When consciousness feels this violence, its anxiety may well make it retreatfrom the truth and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But it can findno peace. If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought trou-bles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia.60

There is of course no such “magical power” for Heidegger, and this becausespirit does not suffer the violence of death “at its own hands,” such thatsome way can be found to reconstruct the subjective purposiveness inher-ent in so suffering, in bringing about such suffering (the purposiveness nec-essarily assumed if this self-inflicted suffering is to count as a deed). FromHegel’s (or perhaps from Adorno’s) point of view, the Heideggerian experi-ence of death as (now, for us) radical not-being, as unintegratable in any waywith Dasein’s projected meaning, is “something we have done to ourselves,”itself can be made sense of, given the historical situation of late modernity,or late industrial capitalism, and so forth. From Heidegger’s point of view,on the other hand, Hegelian death remains Christian; the tarrying of whichHegel spoke is possible because of a faith in “resurrection,” and the ultimacyof death in our experience is not being faced authentically, but clearlyavoided. It is as if Hegel cannot help giving away his dodge and his ownuncertainty with that revealing (most un-Hegelian) word or Freudian slip,Zauberkraft,“magical power.”

But, contrary to many interpretations of Hegel, these remarks by himshow that Hegel does not treat the failure of some community to sustain apractical “directedness” as a mark of some ultimately in-principle overcomeablefinitude. For, only as long as there is such “violence suffered at its ownhands” is there Geist. According to Hegel there is a narrative (“rational”)structure to our coming to this realization, but this is the realization we are coming to (i.e., just the opposite of the jejune invocations of Hegel asannouncing the end of history or a complete “closed” systematicity).61 But,as I have been suggesting, this realization (otherwise known as “AbsoluteKnowledge”) cannot itself be a Heideggerian “happening” since the real-ization that only in such “failure” is there success (success at being Geist) ishistorically an achievement like no other, is what makes what Heidegger calls the “revealing and concealing” process itself manifest.This is why Hegel


treats the final problem of reconciliation in the Phenomenology (Versöhnung)as “forgiveness” (Verzeihung), forgiveness not at being “merely” human butgrounded in the realization of being “absolutely” human.

Stated this way, matters between the Baden and the Schwabian are leftpretty much at a standoff. But Heidegger reminds us that philosophy is “theopposite of all comfort and assurance,”“the highest uncertainty,” and main-tains itself “in authentic questionableness.” So perhaps an unresolved stand-off, an ending that is not an end, is a good place to close.


heidegger’s kant interpretation is, as he admits, “violent,” not meant tobe scholarly exegesis, but to understand the path of Kant’s thought “betterthan” Kant did himself.1 This turns out, perhaps predictably, to mean readingKant’s project in the Critique of Pure Reason as anticipatory of Heidegger’sown project in Being and Time—it is an attempt to “lay the ground” for meta-physics through an analysis of human understanding of being—and as (ulti-mately) a failure at such a project. For, Heidegger argues, Kant too narrowlydefines being as the being of “extant” objects or of nature and (correspond-ingly) did not investigate deeply enough the “subjectivity of the subject.”2

This “reading” of Kant may appear—and has appeared to many Kantians—ahighly dubious one: from a neo-Kantian point of view, for example, Heideg-ger’s characterization of Kant’s project as “ontology,”3 is from the first incon-sistent with the enterprise of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, which (on thisview) is at its heart epistemology, not concerned to establish ontologicaltruths, but only “epistemic conditions,” that is, the forms and justifications forour knowledge.4

Such a dismissal seems, however, premature, since Heidegger’s reading is,somehow, both compelling and unsettling as a reading of Kant. And if oneconstrues Kant’s own transcendental project in a broader, but (I suggest)nonetheless faithful, way—as an investigation into the necessary conditionsfor the possibility of experience5—Heidegger’s interpretation may be readnot simply as a translation of Kant’s claims into his own language and philo-sophical concerns, but as an exercise in transcendental philosophy, indeed as

chapter

Projection and Purposivenessheidegger’s kant and the

temporalization of judgment

Rachel Zuckert

14

a challenge to Kant, namely, that he has failed properly to identify the con-ditions for the possibility of experience.6 Specifically, Heidegger may be saidto argue (contra Kant) that there is a more fundamental condition for thepossibility of experience than Kant’s categorial principles or synthetic a pri-ori judgment(s)—the projective unity of the subject’s transcendental, imagi-native synthesis, and the unity of time itself. Thus, Heidegger argues, wemust “temporalize” Kant’s account of the transcendental subject and of itscharacteristic cognitive activity, synthesis.

Or so I shall suggest here, beginning with an overview of Heidegger’sKant interpretation, before turning to articulate the challenges that Heideg-ger poses to Kant, the philosophical “stakes” of such challenges, and some,preliminary reflections concerning possible Kantian responses. In such ashort chapter, I cannot, of course, adjudicate this Kant-Heidegger debate;rather, I aim more modestly to reformulate Heidegger’s interpretation ascomprising such a debate, and to identify the core lines of argument that di-vide Kant and Heidegger over the necessary conditions for the possibility ofexperience. I shall suggest that this debate is best formulated to concernKant’s distinction (and Heidegger’s rejection thereof ) between reflective anddeterminative judgment. Thus, like Cassirer, I shall suggest that Heidegger’sKant interpretation concerns the Critique of Pure Reason decontextualizedfrom Kant’s larger philosophical system;7 unlike Cassirer, I shall suggest thatHeidegger’s account of subjective, projective “judging” reads the doctrinesof the Critique of Judgment (concerning reflective judgment) “back” into theCritique of Pure Reason (account of determinative judgment), thus occludingthe systematic place, or attempting to undermine the specific concerns, ofthe Critique of Pure Reason within Kant’s system.

1. Heidegger’s Reading of Kant: Interpretation as Confrontation

Heidegger’s Kant interpretation comprises, most generally, a transformationof Kant’s project through rereading Kant’s guiding question in the Critique ofPure Reason concerning whether and how synthetic a priori judgments canbe justified. Heidegger frames his conception of Kant’s project by arguingthat Kant’s understanding of the human knower as “finite”—by contrast toGod’s infinite intellect—serves as Kant’s key premise, from which Kant drawshis claim that human knowledge comprises two, also finite, cognitive facul-ties, sensibility and understanding.8 As finite knowers, that is, as knowers de-pendent upon objects beyond or outside of us, human beings require “recep-tive” intuition. And because we must thus “receive” intuitions of objects, werequire “spontaneous” (active) discursive thinking, that is, conceptual rules forthe unification and “determination” of these intuitions. Thinking is, thus, in

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“service” to intuition, the main source of experience or knowledge of ob-jects,“presenting” such objects to us or allowing us to encounter them.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant then—on Heidegger’s reading—attempts to “reveal” the ways in which human beings attain knowledge ofappearances, through the interaction of these two, distinct cognitive facul-ties in (transcendental) judgment or the act of synthesis (or, more specifi-cally, through the a priori synthesis of the a priori intuitions [space andtime] and concepts [the categories] that “enables” all empirical synthesis ofparticular objects).9 Kant’s question concerning the possibility of meta-physics (or of synthetic a priori judgments) is to be understood as: How is itpossible for human beings to know objects? Or, specifically, how can humanbeings judge, namely synthesize or determine, intuitions to comprise uni-fied objects?10 Not surprisingly, Heidegger then takes the schematism—Kant’s sketchy answer to this question (via the schemata of the imagina-tion)—to be the central chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Heidegger’s emphases upon human (cognitive) finitude in Kant’s project,and on Kant’s consequent understanding of human knowers’ experience asgrounded upon activities of synthesis, understood as the union of under-standing and sensibility, do reflect one of Kant’s most basic doctrines con-cerning human cognition (famously: intuitions without concepts are blind,concepts without intuitions are empty). Likewise, in the Transcendental De-ductions, Kant explains the possibility of the synthetic a priori principles andjustifies the a priori categories as applicable to objects of experience, by ar-guing that they function as rules for transcendental synthesis, which is neces-sary for the possibility of (unified) experience. Kant even occasionally usesthe contrast between divine and human intellect explicitly to ground hisclaims that human knowledge comprises both intuition and discursive think-ing, and (therefore) that the “schematic” character of judgment, namely, ourneed to apply rules to intuitions (or universals to particulars), is characteristicof human knowledge.11

Heidegger’s reading seems, then, not to be (particularly) transformative.But Heidegger does, hereby, deemphasize another central aspect of Kant’sproject: the quaestio juris, or Kant’s description of his project as a justificationof certain synthetic, a priori propositions ( judgments in a narrower, proposi-tional sense), including, most famously, the causal principle,“Every event hasa cause.” (This story of Kant’s formulation of the Critique of Pure Reasonproject—his “awakening” from “dogmatic slumber” by Hume—is familiar,and I will not rehash it here.)12 Heidegger recognizes that he is deempha-sizing Kant’s justificatory question, but argues that once Kant has revealed the categories (in their schematized form) to be necessary conditions for thepossibility of experience, Kant has thereby also answered the quaestio juris.13

We may justifiably claim that objects of experience conform to the categorial

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principles because such principles make experience possible, are “always al-ready” appropriate to any object we could experience.

Thus: a “problem” of synthetic “judgment” is, indeed, central to the Cri-tique of Pure Reason, on Heidegger’s reading, though it is not the justificatoryproblem Kant poses, but an “ontological” problem concerning the possibil-ity of the act of transcendental judgment, how we may synthesize intuitionsas determined by concepts. Correspondingly, Heidegger argues that Kant’s“subjective deduction” of the categories—the argument that categorial syn-thesis is necessary for the possibility of experience—is itself sufficient to an-swer Kant’s most important question, while the “objective” deduction—toestablish that the categories constitute the nature of objectivity, or object-hood (and are, thus, justifiably applied to objects)—is pleonastic.

In concert with his reformulation of Kant’s project, from a justificatory toa “revelatory” one, Heidegger transforms Kant’s conception of the a priori, anepistemological, evidentiary term, into a characterization of our manner andactivity of apprehending objects, namely, as that which we understand “in ad-vance” or “beforehand,” that which we “anticipate” in empirical judgments, orin our “pre-ontological understanding” (everyday practical engagement withthe world).14 This gloss on a priori is, of course, suitably etymological for Hei-degger, but it also plays a philosophical role in securing terminologically (as itwere in advance) Heidegger’s “temporalizing” interpretation of Kant’s views,to which I now turn.

On Heidegger’s reading, Kant’s project itself is not to be understood as ajustification of a priori claims already formulated in scientific investigation,15

but as disclosing structures that are “always already” functioning within ex-perience, that “enable” our more specific apprehension of particular objects,but do so “pre-ontologically,” that is, as implicit, unconceptualized, or unar-ticulated. Kant himself is, then, engaged in “ontology,” understood as the “ob-jectification,”“thematization,” or conceptualization of this “pre-ontological”(Heideggerian) understanding;16 he is “transforming the pre-ontological un-derstanding of being into an explicit ontological understanding.”17 Kant’sproject is, then, itself temporalized, that is, explicitly “situated” as arising outof everyday experience, and as itself, an activity of conceptualization, retro-spectively articulating that which has already been anticipated “in advance.”18

This translation of the a priori into the “in advance” is also central to Hei-degger’s temporalized interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of transcendental judg-mental synthesis. Heidegger argues that the Kantian transcendental synthesisought to be understood not (primarily) as a conceptually guided act of theunderstanding applying concepts or principles to intuited objects (as Kant un-derstands it), but as a projective, anticipatory act of the productive imagina-tion, an act that constitutes “in advance” the horizon within which beings(objects) may be “encountered.”19 This activity of the transcendental imagina-

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tion is, Heidegger suggests, identical to time (as originary temporality) and totranscendental subjectivity itself. Thus, famously, Heidegger claims that Kant“shrinks back” from the conclusion to which his investigation should lead,namely that the transcendental imagination is the “common root” of Kant’stwo primary cognitive faculties, intuition and understanding.20

Heidegger argues for the implicit primacy of the imagination over theunderstanding in Kant’s account of transcendental synthesis by emphasizingthe centrality of the schematism (a function of the imagination, on Kant’sview) in Kant’s project. The imagination is the solution to (Heidegger’s)Kant’s central “problem of judgment,” namely, how the two basic elementsof knowledge may be combined in judgment, despite their utterly distinc-tive natures: the imagination “gives” content to the categories (and order tointuitions) by “bringing” intuitions to the unities of the understanding. Thiscombination is accomplished, Kant himself argues, through the imagina-tion’s relation to time: the imagination mediates between the categories andintuitions by producing schemata or interpretations of the categories asforms or structures of objective time, thereby explaining how the categoriesmay be applied to (combined with) intuitions, which must all be presentedin time, the “pure form” of all intuitions.21

Consonantly with his emphasis upon the “subjective” rather than “objec-tive” deduction (on the abilities of the subject necessary for the possibility ofexperience, not on the necessary character of objecthood or objectivity assuch), Heidegger reads the schematism primarily as providing an account ofthe imagination as a faculty that allows us to unite understanding (thought)and sensibility. The imagination is our ability to “give” ourselves that whichis not given, to “present” that which is not “present,” or (in other words) is“spontaneous intuiting,” or “intuitive creativity.”The imagination thus sharesthe characteristics of the two other faculties, and serves to mediate betweenthem, and it does so because of its unique relationship to time, its “presenta-tion” of that which is not “present.”22 Specifically, our imaginative, anticipa-tory grasp of the future is that which “guides” and unifies the given intuitions,the past and the present, into one synthesis, and thereby makes conceptual“determination” of such intuitions, and indeed unified experience, possible.23

Heidegger identifies “original temporality” itself, in turn, as the ultimatesource of unity in this imaginative synthesis: the imagination’s anticipatorysynthesizing is unified because time itself is so unified, because past, present,and future are “aspects” of the one time that grounds the unity of experi-ence.24 Thus, Heidegger argues, the a priori transcendental synthesis of in-tuitions—guided (on Kant’s view) by the categories—is fundamentally animaginative synthesis, an anticipatory act of synthesis.25

Unlike Heidegger’s reformulation of Kant’s guiding question, this inter-pretation of Kant’s answer to that question is markedly “violent,” at odds


even with Kant’s A edition “subjective deduction,” that is, the account ofthreefold syntheses necessary for the possibility of experience, on whichHeidegger draws. For Heidegger’s interpretation inverts the roles of the cat-egories and of time in Kant’s account. Kant argues that in order for experi-ence to be possible, we must (imaginatively) synthesize a manifold of intu-itions in “apprehension”; in order, in turn, for such apprehension to be pos-sible, we must “reproduce” intuitions (by imagination), and in order (finally)to be able to reproduce intuitions, we must have a concept or rule by whichwe could “recognize” the (reproduced) intuitions as the same or indeed re-produce the same intuition at all.26 The progressive “in order to’s” and“musts” here are (in part) responses to a problem generated by time: we can-not apprehend a manifold (as such) without reproduction because intuition(distinguished solely by its occurrence at a moment in time) is an “absoluteunity” undifferentiated into a manifold. Nor can we “reproduce” withoutconceptual guidance, for intuitions simply qua occurrent at a time are notdistinguishable or reproducible as the “same,” for each moment of time isindistinguishable as such from any other. More broadly, Kant’s arguments inthe Analytic of Principles turn on the claim that we cannot perceive timeitself; therefore, Kant argues, we require the categorial principles in order togenerate a coherent time order. In other words, Kant does indeed takethinking to be in “service to” intuition (specifically) as structures of (objec-tive) time, and argues that only as such structures do the categories have ob-jective “reality” (content or meaning), as Heidegger stresses, but Kant like-wise argues that intuition (here, the pure intuition of time) is unintelligible(“blind”) without such conceptual determination.

As is well known, Heidegger’s counterclaim is that Kant here misunder-stands the nature of time, as the mere, objective time of a “succession ofnows,” and fails to recognize the “originary temporality” that characterizessubjective existence.27 The categorial principles may be structures of objec-tive time (as Kant contends) but they are—more basically—dependent uponthe subject’s imaginative projection (they operate as unities “in advance”)and thus emerge from the unified structure of imagination as unified, orig-inal temporality.28

Heidegger’s violent “interpretation” is, then, a challenge to Kant, for itthreatens to undermine Kant’s central, demonstrative aims, that is, to showthat the categories are necessary for the possibility of experience, and(therefore) that the synthetic a priori judgments employing such categoriesare justifiable claims concerning objects of experience. For if temporality(or the subject) is itself, and can constitute within experience, a “unity ofthe manifold,” then Kant’s argument in the deductions proves otiose, sincein that case the unity of experience does not, solely or originally, derivefrom and require the categorial rules of synthesis.29 The categories may, on

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this view, apply justifiably to (some) experience, as Kant wants to argue, butonly as “thin” articulations of unities thereof; they are not necessary for—nor universally true of—all experience.30 Likewise, the grounding of such cat-egorial claims on the nature of the existentially, originally temporal subjectwould be anathema to Kant: such a substantive, metaphysical claim concern-ing the “noumenal” or “supersensible” nature of the subject would violateKant’s critical limitations on our abilities to know a priori.

From the Heideggerian point of view this debate has parallel (thoughpositively put) consequences as well: if Heidegger shows that such temporalanticipation grounds the unity and possibility of categorial thought or syn-thesis of objects, Heidegger can then argue, as he does, that Kant has(wrongly) identified nature, or objects, as “extant,” as the sole type of objectswe may experience, and that he has identified only those categories that arenecessary to comprehend this type of object. If the categories are only“thin” articulations of a more “primordial” unity of experience (groundedin the activities of the imagination, and in time), it may well be that humanbeings could approach beings from other perspectives, according to otheranticipatory, pre-ontological understandings of being. More generally, sucha move, as Heidegger celebratorily announces, promises a “new and radicalphilosophical grounding of logic,”31 a rejection of the traditional philosoph-ical identification of being with logos (here the categories, or most basicconcepts for thought), by recognizing the dependence of such logos uponexistence and time.32 But Kant “shrank back.”

2. A First Reflection

Despite the “violence” of Heidegger’s reading, and the challenges it presents,several things can, I think, be said in its favor, from a broadly Kantian pointof view. First, Heidegger is right in identifying the odd character of Kant’stranscendental “judgmental” synthesis. Such synthesis is not, on Kant’s view,simply predicative or an establishment of purely conceptual relationships.Kant argues, of course, that synthetic judgment must (in order to be syn-thetic, not analytic) “advance beyond” concepts, must “relate” to an intu-itively given object.33 Such judgment can be construed (still) as predicativeor propositional, distinctive (from analytic judgment) only in that it requiresdifferent justification, that is, a connection in the object. But Kant’s argu-ment that (our apprehension of ) this very connection within the object isgrounded itself upon a “judgmental” synthesis renders Kant’s conception ofjudgmental synthesis a very different (in Heidegger’s terms,“veritative”) sortof synthesis indeed: one that unifies (or institutes relations among) a mani-fold of intuitions, and therefore one that is not, at the very least, exhaustivelyrendered in propositional form.34 As Heidegger emphasizes, Kant argues that


“general logic,” and the corresponding (predicative) definition of judgment (aruled governed relation between two concepts) is distinct, even derivative, froma more fundamental form of judging described by “transcendental logic”(the “logic of truth”) wherein we do not relate concepts to one another butdetermine objects (intuitions) by concepts. Thus Kant is, perhaps, not as faras his terminology (of “judgment”) might suggest from questioning thefoundational role of logos in knowledge or the understanding of being(s).35

Second, Heidegger here provides an interesting, unusual response to along-standing problem posed by Kant’s transcendental psychology, specifi-cally by his accounts of synthesis. On Kant’s account, time is an a prioriform of intuition, and thus forms phenomena alone, and the objective timeorder governing experience and objects is constituted by the subject’s tran-scendental activities of synthesis. The transcendental subject who engages inthese activities is, however, to be considered separately from time; and in-deed as the agent whose activities determine the objective time order, mustbe “prior” to, not determined by, this time order. Synthesis, however, at leastsounds like an activity; it is, thus, difficult to conceive of it as nontemporal.

The two standard responses to this problem are both (in different ways,and with differing severity) reductive. Scholars such as Paul Guyer and Pa-tricia Kitcher propose that Kant’s accounts of synthesis be understood as de-scribing empirically occurring psychological activities; thus such activitiesare not mysterious atemporal activities, but, rather, events (of a particularkind) in time. This view seems, however, a deeply reductive characterizationof Kant, for, on this interpretation, Kantian philosophy must be understoodas an episode in the history of empirical psychology. But according to Kant,empirical psychology and its explanations of its object (the mind) are them-selves governed by the categorial principles, and thus must presuppose, butcannot explain or nonreductively instantiate, the categorial synthesis (nor,on Kant’s view, would empirical psychology carried out entirely a priori bemethodologically acceptable).

On the other hand, scholars such as Henry Allison and P. F. Strawsonconstrue Kant’s claims about synthesis as purely logical claims, articulatingthe normative constraints on how we may conceive of objects or ourselves.The atemporality of the transcendental subject simply means that the sub-ject can (indeed must) conceive of itself and of objects in the “space of rea-sons,” rather than in the order of causes. This line of interpretation is clearlyreconstructive, at odds with Kant’s presentation of synthesis as an activity.More importantly, however, this interpretation raises difficulties concerningwhether or how such normative constraints, rules, or reasons function in ac-tual human experience and judgment.36 This interpretation, then, seems re-ductive (though less problematically so); it is not clear in what sense thistranscendental subject (or its concepts) can be said to be who we actually

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are, to provide an account of what it is like to be a subject of experience, tohave a first-person “point of view.” Nor is it clear, on this view, how (orthat) categorial judgment is to be grounded in its purchase upon (as neces-sary condition for) actual experience. (Such difficulties are, as has been fre-quently argued, exacerbated when one turns to consider Kant’s conceptionof the transcendental subject as moral, free agent.)

By contrast to these two proposals, Heidegger’s proposal that the tran-scendental subject is constituted by an alternative, originary temporalitymight allow one to understand the transcendental subject, coherently andnonreductively, as an agent engaged in synthesis or judgment, and as an ex-periencing subject. But one can also argue that such activity is a precondi-tion for, and “prior” to, the “constitution” of an objective time order as the“succession of ‘nows’” (provided, of course, that originary temporality canbe coherently understood).

Thus, for both well and ill, there is a great deal at stake in Heidegger’s tem-poralizing “reading” of Kant: Heidegger not only threatens Kant’s demon-strative aims, the necessity of the categories (logos) for experience, and vio-lates Kant’s theoretical humility, but also proffers an account of the judging,synthesizing subject that may suit a Kantian’s antireductive inclinations. Butnow we may ask: Does Heidegger give us reason so to conceive of the sub-ject, to unseat the reign of logos, to transcend critical limitations, or to yieldto such inclinations? Why should we, that is, “leap forward” to originarytemporality?

3. Stalemate?

As we have seen, Heidegger himself emphasizes the schematism question—how we may synthesize intuitions according to conceptual rules or unitethe understanding with sensibility—as the central problem of the Critique ofPure Reason and as the main reason for identifying the imagination as the“root” of the two main faculties, or for understanding the subject as charac-terized by originary temporality. The schematism question is potentially atroubling one for Kant, as was also found to be the case by the neo-Kantiansand German Idealists (who both respond by eliminating, in differing ways,Kant’s dualism concerning the sources of cognition). But I am not sure thatthis problem, in its more pressing forms, is addressed by Heidegger’s proposalthat the subject (and, derivatively, its rules of judging) should be understoodas itself temporal. For the question is how intuitions may be construed,rightly, as objects, or how to judge that these intuitions—and not those—areto be unified, or properly subsumed to the categories.37 The subject’s owntemporal status does not, it would seem, make this easier to understand. AndHeidegger’s response to the question concerning correct application suggests


as much, for it seems little different (and no more or less persuasive) than Kant’sown. Heidegger writes:

“Faculty of rules,” . . . means: to hold before us in advance the represented unitieswhich give direction to every possible unification that is represented. These unities( . . . categories) which are represented as regulative, however, must not only havelearned to play their part based on their proper affinity, but this affinity must itself also begrasped comprehensively in advance in a lasting unity through a still more anticipatorypro-posing of them.38

Thus, Heidegger’s solution to the question of correct application is simply agesture toward the “affinity” of concepts to intuitively presented materials.

But in the second emphasized passage above, Heidegger is also asking (Ithink more promisingly) what a subject must be “like” in order to be rule-following, and suggests that such rule-following presupposes that the subjectis anticipatory, or future-directed (or, in more proper Heideggerian languageperhaps, such rule-following presupposes “existence” rather than being).39

Unlike Heidegger’s claim that the imagination (and its schemata) is neces-sary for the application of the categories to intuitions—which Kant doesnot deny, but himself argues—this line of argument would promote Hei-degger’s strongest claim, contra Kant, that imaginative projection is founda-tional, a necessary condition or “root” for the categories or our ability toformulate and follow rules. And perhaps indeed rule-following requires orconstitutively is a stance of anticipatory temporality, not appropriately char-acterized either in terms of objective temporality (mere succession gov-erned by causal law) or as atemporal.

As suggested in the title of this section, this line of argument might seem,however, to lead to a stalemate between Heidegger and Kant. For Kantwould, of course, reply to this suggestion that only because we can followrules can we take such a projective, anticipatory stance, or employ the “pro-ductive imagination” to anticipate or project a unified time order and worldin “advance” of particular, individual experiences.40 It is, precisely, the univer-sality of categorial rules (their application to numerous, temporally distinctinstances) and our ability to employ such rules that allows us to “anticipate”nonpresent (future) order in the world or states of affairs.

Apart from the general suggestion here that Kant perhaps illicitly privi-leges epistemological over ontological conditions (why should rules countas conditions, while the nature of the subject does not?), Heidegger does, atleast implicitly, provide broadly epistemological grounds to reject this claim(that such projection could be grounded upon concepts) expressed mostclearly in his temporalization of Kant’s project itself (as an act of conceptu-alization or “thematization”): in order to be following concepts or rules (orfor these to be the “basis” for synthesis or judgment), Heidegger suggests,

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we must be conscious of such concepts as such. And just as Kant’s projectmust be understood as a “conceptualization” of the “preconceptual,” so toomust the applicability of the categorial principles to experience be a (mere)conceptualized by-product of a more “original,” preconceptual, imaginativeprojection.

In some sense, Heidegger must be right: if Kant claims that the cate-gories or the principles employing them are necessary conditions for thepossibility of experience, that they articulate the ultimately judgmental, syn-thetic character of experience for all subjects, at all times, these principlesmust be understood as “pre-ontological,” implicit, rather than explicit, prin-ciples of judgment and experience. (Even those of us who have read theCritique of Pure Reason, and thus are explicitly conscious of the categories,schemata, and principles, do not, consciously or explicitly, engage in judg-ment or synthesis to generate our experience.) This implicit status of syn-thetic a priori judgments is, indeed, consistent with Kant’s view of the ( jus-tified) a priori as the form or “constitutive” structure of experience, whichentails that one may need to engage in considerable analysis (or, as Kant putsit,“sifting”) of experience to generate explicit formulations of “pure” a pri-ori principles. The familiarity, or obviousness, of the principles—once for-mulated—might then reflect, as Heidegger suggests, a recognition of thatwhich we have “pre-ontologically,” always already understood.

Do such considerations entail Heidegger’s more radical suggestion thatKant’s principles not only render explicit that which is implicit, but conceptu-alize a preconceptual “understanding,” or (thereby or therefore) that one oughtto understand the experience-constituting activity of synthesis, and the sub-ject engaged in such synthesis, as characterized by “originary” temporality?It seems not: Kant’s explicit principles may be taken, rather, as articulating apriori commitments that are, indeed, implicit in ordinary empirical judgmentsor experience, as conceptual. For, one might suggest, the categories compriseimplicit conceptual content (or, in Kant’s terms,“marks”) in empirical concepts.Thus in Kant’s famous examples, “The sun shines, and the stone is warm,”and “The sun warms the stone,” the category of quality might be “part” ofthe conceptual content of “warm,” as might the category, cause, comprise acomponent of “event” or “process” (in “warming”). More broadly, since con-cepts are rules or functions by which we categorize, unify, or determine( judge) appearances, on Kant’s view, these categories might—as syntax does,for natural language users—operate as rules within or governing behavior(here empirical judgment, but also imaginative projection). As applied andapplicable universally, and as unifying, such rules perform the function ofconcepts, even if the subject is not conscious of this function.

From a Kantian point of view, then, Heidegger’s position appears to bebased on an assumption that concepts (categories) must be explicitly such


“for” the judging subject, in order so to function in a subject’s experience,and therefore might be said to betray an inappropriately Cartesian presump-tion concerning the transparency of subjectivity and conceptual thought.From a Heideggerian point of view, Kant helps himself to a very broadconception of concepts (or rule-following), thus (“in advance”) cementingthe foundational status of rules, concepts, or logos, and precluding the ques-tions Heidegger (like Wittgenstein) wishes to raise concerning the degree towhich practical competence (or behavior responsive to norms) can be char-acterized as a form of (explicit-)rule-following.

Thus the Heidegger-Kant debate might be formulated in these terms:Does rule-following depend upon temporal anticipation, or vice versa? Doesthe imagination “ground” the categories’ function as rules to unify experi-ence, or does it merely “execute” the norms given by such categories? Doespractical competence (in empirical judging or “pre-ontological understand-ing”) ground rules and make explicit rule-following possible, or do rulesgovern or define such practices? These are real questions, but arguments forthem turn (as I have just suggested) on almost question-begging concep-tions of rules on either side; certainly the considerations Heidegger raiseshere against Kant are not weighty enough to press Kant into accepting aradically metaphysical (from a Kantian point of view) conception of thejudging subject.

Heidegger also argues, however, that the imagination is the “root” of thecategories by providing an alternative “Metaphysical Deduction” (the ac-count of the origin of the categories) to the one that Kant himself provides.This line of argument is, I shall suggest, a better, more unequivocal case fortaking anticipatory temporality to be independent of, and indeed a precon-dition for, categorially determined synthesis or conceptually governed judg-ment. It also, as I shall argue, suggests a more precise and tractable reformu-lation of the Kant-Heidegger debate, as one concerning the relationship be-tween reflective and determinative judgment.

4. A Reformulation: The Necessity (or Not) of Determinative Judgment

On Kant’s view, the categories are a priori concepts; they are not innate,however, but are generated by the understanding. In the Metaphysical De-duction, Kant argues (specifically) that the categories are so generated fromthe forms of judgment elaborated in general logic. Heidegger rejects thisaccount because (he argues) the categories are rules of (“veritative”) synthe-sis of the intuitive manifold and cannot, therefore, be derived from the(“predicative”) functions of judgmental unification in general logic, whichconcern merely unification of concepts, independent of “reference” to an

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object or intuitions.41 Heidegger suggests that the categories are (rather)generated through two cognitive activities, both described (by Kant) as actsof “reflection”: the activity of empirical concept formation, and the act ofself-understanding wherein one brings one’s mental activities and theirfunctions (here the first kind of reflection) to self-consciousness. Becauseempirical concept formation is synthesizing judgment of the intuitivelygiven, Heidegger argues, it can be the origin for the categories as syntheticfunctions of intuitions.42 And (Kant’s account of ) empirical concept forma-tion shows that this “origin” is, indeed, an act of imaginative anticipation;thus not only is imaginative anticipation possible without categorial guid-ance, but the categories themselves derive (depend upon) such imaginativeanticipation as their origin.

Kant describes empirical concept formation as follows:

To make concepts out of representations one must . . . be able to compare, to reflect,and to abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are the essen-tial and universal conditions for generation of every concept whatsoever. I see, e.g.,a spruce, a willow, and a linden. By first comparing these objects with one another Inote that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk, the branches,the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they have in common among them-selves, trunk, branches, and leaves themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, thefigure, etc. of these; thus I acquire the concept of a tree.43

Heidegger reads this description (plausibly) as providing an account of theanticipatory activity of judgment, in which we (must) hold before ourselvesa unity “in advance,” in order to perform the comparison, discrimination,and abstraction that will then allow us to conceptualize that very unity:

Of these three acts [comparison, reflection, and abstraction], reflection has a crucialand leading role. . . . For prior to everything else there is an advance bringing intoview that in reference to which an intuitively extant many is to be noted as differ-ent. What is different in its possible difference [for example, differently arrangedbranches] gets determined only on the basis of this unifying one of agreement [hav-ing branches of some sort], so that on the basis of reflection we can explicitly disre-gard “the respect in which given representations are different.” . . . Reflection is sit-uated in the anticipatory bringing into view that with regard to which the manyshould be compared.44

This activity of reflection is, as Kant’s example suggests, the activity of em-pirical concept formation; but Heidegger takes Kant’s claim that it is the “es-sential condition” for the generation of “any” concept at Kant’s word, andargues that this activity generates the categories (a priori concepts) as well.The categories, Heidegger suggests, are conceptualized articulations of theunifying functions or relations (e.g., genus and species/differentia, and dis-junction) implicit or “held in advance” in empirical concept formation (or,


in Kant’s terms, they are “representations” of the unifying functions of con-sciousness).45 Such explicit representations of these functions of unifying arebrought to consciousness (made explicit) by “reflection” in the second sense,understanding of one’s own cognitive activities.Thus the categories are whatis implicit “in advance” in reflective concept formation, an activity itself“temporal” in Heidegger’s “originary” sense, as governed by, and directedtoward, a future, anticipated unity.

Kant does not explicitly hold the Heideggerian view concerning empir-ical concept formation, but he may well suggest such a view in his Critiqueof Judgment account of “reflective” judgment—including empirical conceptformation—as ruled by the principle of “purposiveness.”46 Kant defines “re-flective” judgment—by contrast to “determinative” judgment (the judgmentwith which the Critique of Pure Reason is concerned)—as judgment in whichwe are not “guided by” a concept or rule in judging, nor do we “deter-mine” an object thereby; rather, we “seek” the universal (that might, later, beused to determine objects).47 This judgmental activity is, then, not (fully)conceptually guided by definition, and it does indeed “aim” at conceptual-ization of the preconceptual (sensations or empirical particulars as such).And because we seek empirical concepts, the governing unities of objectswe seek here cannot, unlike the categories, be gleaned from our judgmentalactivities themselves. This is, indeed, what one might call a “transcendental”definition of the empirical: that which we do not, cannot, determine a pri-ori, that to which we must be “open” or “responsible.”

“Reflective” judgment is thus unifying without (prior) conceptual deter-mination, but on Kant’s view it cannot, merely, be intuitive apprehensionwithout principled guidance, for such apprehension would be mere “grop-ing,” potentially overwhelmed by undifferentiated, chaotic sense experience.And indeed reflective judgment does have its own “principle”: the principleof “purposiveness.” Kant characterizes this principle and its role in empiricalconcept formation as follows: in attempting to form empirical concepts, wemust presuppose that nature is “purposive” for us, that it coheres with ourcognitive aims.48 This formulation does not suggest that purposiveness hasanything to do with Heidegger’s projective temporality, but Kant also un-derstands purposiveness to be “directedness” by or toward a purpose anduses it to characterize the act of reflective judging itself.49 As such, it bearsconsiderable similarity to Heidegger’s anticipatory projection: reflectivejudging is structured as “directedness toward” a (not given) purpose (here,the empirical concept of this sort of object), or is a unification unified by itsown aims at unification or anticipation of unity. Kant’s characterization ofaesthetic reflective judgment (the judging “solely” governed by the principleof purposiveness) bears striking similarities to Heidegger’s account of imag-inative synthesis: in such judging, Kant argues, we are not guided by con-

228 Rachel Zuckert

cepts; rather, the imagination “unintentionally” or “purposively without apurpose” apprehends the object as a unity of the manifold.50

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant provides, moreover, strictly “subjective”deductions for this principle and act of judging, as (merely) “subjective con-ditions” for the possibility of experience. Reflective judging—and its prin-ciple, purposiveness—are not “determinative” of objects; reflective judgingcomprises, precisely, an openness to objects in their empirical character, nota determination of them. But such judging is a “subjective condition” forexperience: if we cannot form empirical concepts, we would, Kant argues(plausibly), be incapable of any coherent experience.51 Thus, on the Kantianas on the Heideggerian view, we must be able to transform the preconcep-tual into the conceptual.

Perhaps, then, Kant’s account of reflective judgment in the Critique ofJudgment vindicates Heidegger’s reading of Kant: though Kant does not ar-ticulate the “original temporality” of the judging subject, Kant himselfidentifies “purely subjective” conditions for the possibility of experience,which comprise something like an anticipatory, non-conceptually guidedgrasp of the unity of the object.52 And Heidegger suggests so: he cites para-graph 59 of the Critique of Judgment as confirmation of his views concern-ing Kant’s conception of transcendental imagination and subjectivity,53 apassage in which Kant (strikingly) argues that insofar as reflective, aestheticjudging is purposive (end-directed, though without a conceptually specifiedend) it not only “symbolizes” our capacity for moral self-legislation (ofends), but also reveals the supersensible nature of the subject.54

But Heidegger’s reading of Kant is not, I suggest, completely vindicatedhere, specifically Heidegger’s suggestions that the recognition of such antic-ipatorily temporal subjectivity will undermine the status of the categoriesor discursive thought. For Kant gives Heidegger’s purely subjective “deduc-tion” a systematic place: the subjective principle of purposiveness does notoverride, but complements, the objective a priori principles as (subjective andobjective) conditions for the possibility of experience; and it governs ourexperience and knowledge of empirical nature in particular. Kant’s contrastbetween determinative and reflective judgment is a distinction between twosorts of subjective conditions for the possibility of experience: the condi-tions for the possibility of (our knowledge of ) universal and necessary, lawfulorder in the world and the conditions for the possibility of (our knowledgeof ) contingent (empirical, particular, and diversified) order. Thus Kant mayadmit that the categorial principles are not necessary conditions for anyunity of experience or unification of the manifold, but argue that we re-quire a priori rules for necessary order in nature or the necessary unity of ob-jects as such. Kant indeed suggests just such a role for the categories in theA-Deduction:“We find that our thought of the relation of all knowledge to


its object carries with it an element of necessity; the object is viewed as thatwhich prevents our modes of knowledge from being haphazard or arbi-trary.”55 Since all “necessity, without exception, is grounded in a transcenden-tal condition,”56 this (necessary) unity “is impossible if the intuition cannot begenerated in accordance with a rule by means . . . [to make] the reproduc-tion of the manifold a priori necessary.”57 Objectivity (object-hood) as suchis a unification of the manifold that “resists” our arbitrary construal; the cate-gories constitute such unity precisely in their function as a priori rules.

If one places Kant’s arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason in the con-text of his systematic consideration of judgment, the debate between Kantand Heidegger may be reformulated, then, not to concern the question howany (synthetic) unity in experience is possible, but the question whether—even if all concepts (unities) ultimately originate in reflective judging—wemust engage in determinative, as well as reflective, judgment for experience tobe possible, whether we must not only imaginatively anticipate but also en-gage in conceptually determined or rule-governed synthesis. Correspond-ingly, Heidegger’s reading of the Critique of Pure Reason might be seen as atransformation of a priori determinative judgment into reflective judgment,thus eliding these two conditions, proposing that the sole a priori condi-tions for the possibility of experience are conditions for the apprehension ofcontingent order.58 This elision is corroborated by Heidegger’s striking dele-tion of “necessity” terms (including “laws” or “lawfulness”) in his character-ization of Kant’s project, as compared to the pervasiveness of such terms inKant’s text (which pervasiveness the Kant-responding-to-Hume line of inter-pretation emphasizes).

Again, Heidegger’s deletion is not coincidental: the necessary content of apriori determinative judgments is necessary for the possibility of experi-ence, on Kant’s view, because it grounds a distinction between the “merelysubjective” and the objective construed as independent-of-or-resistant-to-the-subject.59 On Heidegger’s view, the categorial rules function, then, togenerate a falsifying, or at least highly derivative, self-conception as separatefrom objects, not as transcending itself toward the world, a metaphysicalview of subjects (Heidegger contends) simply presupposed, on the Kantianview, as fundamental.60

The questions that divide Kant and Heidegger may, therefore, be moreprecisely characterized, in Kantian terms, as follows: Must we be able to for-mulate specifically necessary and universal claims in order to have experi-ence? Must we be able to distinguish our “subjective” experiences from ob-jects of experience proper, in order to have self-conscious experience? Or,in Heideggerian terms: Must we conceive of objects as “merely” present athand? And, if so, must we come to such a conception through conceptualrules of necessary or normative import, rather than through “breakdown” or

230 Rachel Zuckert

anxiety?61 Or, in terms of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation: for experience tobe possible, we may indeed require intentional objects recognized as differ-ent from or “against” ourselves (as “objects” or Gegenstände). Is, as Heideggersuggests, intuitive “givenness” (and our reflective openness thereto) enoughto comprise the “againstness” of the intentional object—or must we, as Kantcontends, employ conceptual determination in order to render (or con-ceive) an object as such, as “over against” us?

These questions are, of course, too large to be addressed here. In conclu-sion, I shall simply note that we can now see the (meta)philosophical signif-icance of Heidegger’s reformulation of Kant’s question concerning a priorisynthetic judgment, with which I began, and that this leaves us with a finalquestion that weighs, perhaps, in Kant’s favor.62 For the necessary and uni-versal “content” of the categorial principles is, on Kant’s view, the “sign” thatsuch principles are known a priori (if known at all), and this therefore pro-vides the impetus to a strictly philosophical project, as opposed to naturalistor psychological explanations for the origins of such propositions. Or, thatis, such principles raise a quaestio juris. Heidegger’s dismissal of the quaestiojuris as pleonastic (in favor of “straight” investigation or “revelation” of thesubjective conditions for the possibility of experience), is, as we can nowsee, quite consistent with his deletion of Kant’s concerns with (logical and[meta]physical) necessity, and with his assimilation of determinative to re-flective judgment. But this dismissal might also be something like kickingaway the ladder. For why should one engage in this transcendental investi-gation of the nature of subjectivity if there is no “clue” that a priori, subjec-tively contributed concepts do function in experience? Or: if, as on bothKant’s and Heidegger’s views, the philosopher’s task is to articulate the a pri-ori “forms” that ground experience, how is one to “sift out” the a priori,properly philosophical claims from purely empirical facts about human be-ings? Necessity functions as such a “clue” for Kant. And from within thetranscendental framework, motivated and justified by the quaestio juris, Kantcan then suggest that explaining the possibility of empirical knowledgemight require a “purposive” conception of subjectivity (in its reflectivejudging), a conception of subjectivity (I have suggested) that Heideggergreatly expands and reads back into the Critique of Pure Reason. What, how-ever, functions as such a “clue” for Heidegger or for Heidegger’s Kant?


reference matter

Notes

In the present volume, whether in endnotes or in the text of the chapters themselves,citations from Being and Time will refer to the John Macquarrie and Edward Robin-son translation (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), unless a chapter author prefers thetranslation by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997),which will be noted separately. The corresponding pages in Sein und Zeit will befrom the Niemeyer edition of 1993. The citations will give the English page num-ber first, followed by the German pagination (again, unless indicated otherwise).

chapter 1: introduction

1. There is an existing literature, of course, on Heidegger’s relation to Kant,which includes, in English, Charles Sherover, Heidegger, Kant, and Time (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1971); Frank Schalow, The Renewal of the Kant-Heideg-ger Dialogue (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992); and MartinWeatherstone, Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant (London: Palgrave, 2003). This is anarea that is still relatively undeveloped, though it is receiving increasing attention.Indeed, the work of several contributors to this volume, including that of WilliamBlattner, Daniel O. Dahlstrom, and Robert B. Pippin, has been particularly impor-tant in this respect. Heidegger’s relation to the wider transcendental tradition hasalso attracted some attention. Manfred Brelage’s pioneering Studien zur Transzenden-talphilosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965) explores the relation between Heidegger andthe transcendental logic of the neo-Kantians; and Carl-Friedrich Gethmann’s Verste-hen und Auslegung: Das Methodenproblem in der Philosophie Martin Heideggers (Bonn:Bouvier, 1974) remains an indispensable treatment of the transcendental elements inHeidegger’s thought. For a more recent effort see Steven Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger,and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press, 2001).

2. Suspicion of the idea of the transcendental within English-speaking thoughtundoubtedly goes back to the association between that notion and idealist philoso-phy. However, two seminal papers—Barry Stroud, “Transcendental Arguments,”Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 241–56; and Stephan Körner, “The Impossibility ofTranscendental Arguments,” Monist 51 (1967): 317–31—have been extremely influ-ential in advancing similarly negative assessments of the viability of transcendental

modes of reasoning (although in Stroud’s case, this has also gone hand-in-hand with arecognition of the importance of the issues such arguments are intended to address).

3. A more developed version of this way of understanding the idea of the tran-scendental appears in Jeff Malpas,“The Transcendental Circle,” Australasian Journal ofPhilosophy 75 (1997): 1–20.

4. Recent discussion of this issue in English and German can be usefully trackedin three collections: Transcendental Arguments and Science, ed. Peter Bieri, Rolf-PeterHorstman, and Lorenz Krüger (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979); Bedingungen der Möglichkeit:“Transcendental Arguments” und transzendentales Denken, ed. Eva Shaper and WilhelmVossenkuhl (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984); and Transcendental Arguments: Problems andProspects, ed. Robert Stern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

5. The relevant texts can be found as appendices 3 and 4 in Martin Heidegger,Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indi-ana University Press, 1997), pp. 191–207.

6. In addition to the article by Stroud, cited in note 2, above, see Moltke S.Gram,“Transcendental Arguments,” Nous 5 (1972): 15–26; and Anthony Brueckner,“Transcendental Arguments I,” Nous 17 (1983): 551–75.

chapter 2: ontology, the a priori, and the primacy of practice

1. “Early philosophy” refers principally to Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), but alsoto The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie); Phe-nomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” (Phänomenologische Inter-pretation von Kants “Kritik der reinen Vernunft”); and other lectures from the mid- tolate 1920s.

2. William Blattner, “Is Heidegger a Representationalist?” Philosophical Topics 27(1999): 179–204;“Laying the Ground for Metaphysics: Heidegger’s Appropriation ofKant,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon, 149–76, 2nded. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and “The Primacy of Practiceand Assertoric Truth: Dewey and Heidegger,” in Heidegger,Authenticity and Modernity:Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, vol. 1,231–49 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

3. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann,Gesamtausgabe, vol. 24 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975), p. 15.

4. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1993).

5. In what follows I shall make two controversial translation choices. First, I shallrender Erkenntnis as “cognition.” This diverges from Macquarrie and Robinson’s“standard” translation of Being and Time, in which they use “knowing” instead. Mychoice reflects recent practice among translators of Kant, such as Paul Guyer andAllen Wood in their translation of The Critique of Pure Reason (which is not, how-ever, the one I shall use below). One indirect advantage of my way of renderingHeidegger is that we can distinguish between the general “problem of cognition”under discussion in § 13 of Being and Time and the more focused problem of the“provability of the external world” in § 43a. I suggest that Heidegger means to ap-

236 Notes to Chapters 1–2

ply the strategy of § 13 to the issues of § 43a; they are not, however, exactly thesame problem. Second, I shall render Vernehmen as “taking-in” or “taking-as,” ratherthan “perception,” as Macquarrie and Robinson do. This makes better sense of theflow of argument in the crucial paragraph from p. 61 to p. 62 of Sein und Zeit, as Ishall argue below. (See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyerand Allen Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]; and Martin Hei-degger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York:Harper and Row, 1962].) In what follows, all translations from Sein und Zeit are myown unless otherwise noted.

6. Specifically, Heidegger characterizes interpretation as a “development” (Ausbil-dung) of understanding. See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 188/148.

7. Ibid., p. 89/62. 8. Ibid., p. 189/149.9. Ibid., p. 385/336. 10. Ibid., p. 183/143.11. Ibid., pp. 188–89/148–49.12. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 440.13. Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and

Time,” Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).14. Being and Time, p. 99/69.15. Ibid., p. 89/62.16. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 5; my emphasis.17. Note, as well, that on this construal the role of the concept of interpretation

in the § 13 argumentation becomes unclear.18. There is the one reference to “mathematical functionalization” on p. 122/88,

but that is about it.19. Being and Time, p. 189/149. 20. Ibid., p. 191/150.21. Ibid. 22. Ibid.23. I would actually want to dispute this assimilation on Heidegger’s part, but

that does not matter here. See Blattner, “Is Heidegger a Representationalist?” forsome suggestions along these lines.

24. Being and Time, p. 189/149, quoted in part above.25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Lon-

don: Macmillan, 1968),A79/B104–5.26. There is some confusion in the text surrounding this implication. I have

tried to resolve it in Blattner,“Is Heidegger a Representationalist?”27. Being and Time, p. 89/62.28. Ibid., p. 183/143, quoted above.29. As I begin to argue in Blattner, “Primacy of Practice and Assertoric Truth,”

Heidegger understands practice differently than does Dewey, and for this reason,Heidegger does not accept anything like the classical pragmatist account of truth. Itwould, thus, be highly misleading to characterize Heidegger as a pragmatist, even ifthere are certain important affinities between the early Heidegger and Dewey.

30. Being and Time, pp. 30–31/10–11.

Notes to Chapter 2 237

31. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” trans. ParvisEmad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 25.

32. In Blattner,“Laying the Ground.”33. In light of the first section of this chapter, this formulation might be confus-

ing. Understanding in Kant refers to a conceptually articulated act, whereas in Beingand Time it refers to a preconceptual activity. Thus, Kantian understanding is a formof Heideggerian interpretation. Understanding in Being and Time corresponds betterwith Kant’s “pure productive imagination,” at least as interpreted by Heidegger.

34. Blattner,“Laying the Ground.”35. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 187.36. I here restate Heidegger’s analysis of the “threefold synthesis” in the A-De-

duction, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A98–104. See Heidegger, PhänomenologischeInterpretation von Kants “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” ed. Ingtraud Görland, Gesamtaus-gabe, vol. 25 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), § 24. It is obviously modeledupon Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness, the published version of which Hei-degger edited during the period in which he was mulling over Kant. See EdmundHusserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidegger,trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964).

37. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 247.38. I have, in any case, gone into this in considerable detail in my William Blatt-

ner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).39. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,A11–12/B25.40. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 15.41. Ibid., pp. 12–13.42. Ibid., p. 28.43. Being and Time, p. 414/363. In § 69b of Being and Time, from which the last

sentence is drawn, there is ambiguity about whether objectification consummatesthe “change-over” from the available to the occurrent, or whether objectification isa more basic process. Heidegger writes,“The scientific projection of entities that wesomehow already encounter allows their sort of being to be explicitly understood,so much so, in fact, that the possible paths to a pure discovery of intraworldly enti-ties become manifest. We call the whole of this projecting, including the articula-tion of the understanding of being, the delineation of the material region (Sachge-biet), and the sketching out of the appropriate conceptuality that belongs to the en-tities, thematizing” (Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 414/363). The reference to the“pure discovery” of entities, that is, to the experience of the occurrent, suggests thatthe stronger reading of thematizing, as the process through which entities becomeshorn of context. It may well be, however, that the reference here to pure discoveryis an artifact of the context in which it is used, the context in which Heidegger isdiscussing precisely the origin of natural science. By “thematizing” and “objectify-ing,” therefore, Heidegger might simply have in mind the development of under-standing into interpretation. Following this suggestion,“objectifying” refers to theprocess whereby something is made amenable to conceptualization, becomes avail-able for cognition and interpretation in the broadest sense. This suggestion fits wellwith the use of “thematizing” in Basic Problems, for surely whatever else he might

238 Note to Chapter 2

want to say, Heidegger does not mean to indicate that phenomenology somehowmakes being occurrent. That would be a category error of the rankest sort, a viola-tion of the Ontological Difference. Rather, phenomenology is the science in whichbeing becomes salient, explicit, available for interpretation. Further, as I will indicatebelow, reading “thematizing” and “objectifying” the way I do here also explains whyall interpretation is thematic, as Heidegger says in § 32.

44. Being and Time, p. 62/37.45. The worry I am highlighting here, it should be noted, is not the tension be-

tween description and interpretation, between transparency and construal, thatmany readers have found in Being and Time. Even if we could understand how a “di-rect presentation” (ibid., p. 59/35) of being could at the same time be an interpreta-tion reflecting the “obvious, undiscussed assumptions of the interpreter” (ibid., p.192/150), we still would not be any closer to seeing how a preconceptual conditionfor the possibility of conceptualization could be conceptualized.

46. Nor is, I believe,“formal indication.” Kisiel makes much out of formal indi-cation as a potential solution to the problem and thereby places a heavy burden onthe few references to formal indication in Being and Time. As with hermeneutics,however,“formal indication” is merely a name for the problem, not a solution.

47. Kisiel, Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time.”48. Towards the Definition of Philosophy (trans. Ted Sadler [London: Continuum,

2002]), is a translation of Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, ed. BerndHeimbüchel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 56–57, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,1999). These volumes comprise Heidegger’s lectures from the war emergency andsummer semesters of 1919.

49. In one sense, Husserl’s principle is not even a principle:“If by a principle onewere to understand a theoretical proposition, this designation would not be fitting”(Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 92).

50. Ibid., pp. 92–93. 51. Ibid., p. 93.52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., quoted above.54. Steven Crowell,“Heidegger’s Phenomenological Decade,” Man and World 28,

no. 4 (1995): 435–48.55. And that means giving up on phenomenology as well. The Kant lectures are

perhaps, then, the close of Heidegger’s “phenomenological decade,” the close notjust in the sense of ending, and not so much a consummation as a collapse.

56. “What Is Metaphysics?” (Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, pp. 89–110,rev. and exp. ed. [New York: HarperCollins, 1993]) is a translation of Martin Hei-degger,“Was ist Metaphysik?”

57. Martin Heidegger, “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, trans. JoanStambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 24.

58. Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

59. I would like to thank the participants of the conference on which this vol-ume is based, Heidegger and Transcendental Philosophy (Rice University, Houston,April 2003), as well as the participants of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Interna-tional Society for Phenomenological Studies (Asilomar, CA, July 2003), all of whom


listened and responded to an earlier version of this argument. I would like to thankespecially the editors of this volume, Steve Crowell and Jeff Malpas.

chapter 3: heidegger on kant on transcendence

1. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. Royal Prussian [laterGerman] Academy of Sciences, vol. 3 (Berlin: Georg Reimer [later Walter deGruyter], 1900–),A84/B116.

2. Ibid., p. A89/B122.3. Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” ed. Ing-

traud Görland, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 25 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), p.309. All translations are author’s unless otherwise stated.

4. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1951),pp. 68ff.

5. Phänomenologische Interpretation, pp. 372ff.6. Ibid., p. 384.7. Ibid., p. 315.8. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik,Vorwort.9. Phänomenologische Interpretation, p. 3.10. Ibid.11. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, p. 25.12. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann,

Gesamtausgabe, vol. 24 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975), p. 177.13. Being and Time, p. 367/319.14. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, pp. 21–22, 174.15. Ibid., pp. 21–22.16. Phänomenologische Interpretation, p. 321.17. Ibid., p. 320. 18. Ibid., p. 322.19. Ibid., p. 319. 20. Ibid., p. 312.21. Ibid., p. 316. 22. Ibid., p. 314.23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., p. 315.25. Ibid., 319. 26. Ibid., p. 308.27. Kritik der reinen Vernunft,A85/B117.28. Phänomenologische Interpretation, p. 311.29. Ibid., p. 400.30. Kritik der reinen Vernunft,A111.31. Phänomenologische Interpretation, pp. 330ff.32. Ibid., p. 315.33. Ibid.34. Ibid.35. Ibid., p. 331; see also Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, p. 151.36. Phänomenologische Interpretation, p. 324.37. Ibid., p. 333.38. Ibid., p. 373; Kritik der reinen Vernunft,A341/B399ff.39. Kritik der reinen Vernunft,A115; Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, p. 126.


40. Kritik der reinen Vernunft,A118; Phänomenologische Interpretation, p. 410.41. Kritik der reinen Vernunft,A15/B29.42. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, p. 147.43. Phänomenologische Interpretation, p. 376.44. Ibid., pp. 408–9.45. Ibid., p. 12.46. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Chicago: Regnery,

1956), p. 17.47. Kritik der reinen Vernunft,A50/B47. 48. Ibid.,A50/B47; cf. A147/B242.49. Ibid.,A104. 50. Ibid., B3.51. Ibid., Bxiv. 52. Ibid.,A369.53. Ibid., B136.54. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenom-

enological Philosophy: First Book, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983), § 62.55. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenom-

enology:An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans David Carr (Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press, 1970), § 30.

56. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations:An Introduction to Phenomenology, transDorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), p. 26.

chapter 4: conscience and reason

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:Macmillan, 1968), p. 96; Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed.Royal Prussian [later German] Academy of Sciences, vol. 3 (Berlin: Georg Reimer[later Walter de Gruyter], 1900–),A56/B80.

2. Ibid., p. 100;A63/B87.3. See, for one instance, Martin Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans.

Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 134:“We must . . .make intentionality itself into a problem.”

4. Evidence for the first construal can be found at Martin Heidegger, Being andTime, p. 224/180, while evidence for the second construal can be found on the im-mediately following page of Heidegger’s text. Future references to Being and Timewill be inserted into the text at the appropriate point. In this chapter I have gener-ally followed the Macquarrie and Robinson translation, but I will modify the trans-lation as I see fit, without comment.

5. Martin Heidegger,“The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” in The QuestionConcerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper andRow, 1977), p. 112.

6. Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: deGruyter, 1967), p. 329. Translations from Tugendhat are mine.

7. Ibid., p. 351.8. On constitutive rules, see John Haugeland, “Truth and Rule-Following,” in

Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, by John Haugeland (CambridgeMA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 303–61.

Notes to Chapters 3–4 241

9. This Wittgensteinian reading has been most forcefully elaborated by HubertDreyfus, Being-in-the-World:A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Division I(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

10. Robert B. Pippin,“On Being Anti-Cartesian: Hegel, Heidegger, Subjectivityand Sociality,” in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, by Robert B. Pippin(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 381.

11. Ibid., pp. 382, 388.12. Robert B. Pippin, “Heideggerian Historicity and Metaphysical Politics,” in

Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, by Robert B. Pippin (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1997), p. 410.

13. Pippin,“On Being Anti-Cartesian,” pp. 386–87; 378.14. Ibid., pp. 386–87; 390.15. Pippin,“Heideggerian Historicity,” p. 404.16. Ibid., p. 410.17. Ernst Tugendhat, “Wir sind nicht fest gedrahtet: Heideggers ‘Man’ und die

Tiefdimension der Gründe,” in Aufsätze, 1992–2000 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,2001), p. 150. Following Tom Scanlon,Tugendhat defines a “reason” as “somethingthat speaks for something,” where the latter “something” is almost always “a judg-ment or an intention or an action” (p. 143). All translations from Tugendhat’s essayare mine.

18. Tugendhat,“Heideggers ‘Man’,” p. 144.19. Ibid., p. 158. 20. Ibid., pp. 149–50.21. Ibid., p. 157. 22. Ibid., p. 159.23. Ibid., p. 160.24. Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 215.25. Ibid., p. 217.26. Tugendhat,“Heideggers ‘Man,’” p. 151.27. There are a number of ambiguities in these passages. I here provide the Ger-

man for comparison: “Das Selbst, das als solches den Grund seiner selbst zu legenhat, kann dessen nie mächtig werden und hat doch existierend das Grundsein zuübernehmen.”“Nicht durch es selbst, sondern an es selbst entlassen aus dem Grunde,um als dieser zu sein. Das Dasein ist nicht insofern selbst der Grund seines Seins, alsdieser aus eigenem Entwurf erst entspringt, wohl aber ist es als Selbstsein das Seindes Grundes. Dieser ist immer nur Grund eines Seienden, dessen Sein das Grund-sein zu übernehmen hat” (Being and Time, p. 377/284; 378/285).

28. Carl-Friedrich Gethmann, Verstehen und Auslegung: Das Methodenproblem in derPhilosophie Martin Heideggers (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974), p. 141. All translations from thisbook are mine.

29. Ibid., p. 208.30. Ibid., pp. 222, 227–28, recognizes that Heidegger owes us an account of “how

something like principles lie in the Seinsvollzug des Daseins.” Unlike most commen-tators, however, he sees that Heidegger provides the beginning of such an accountin the chapter on conscience and guilt, even if there are “gaps between the funda-mental-ontological phenomenon of being-guilty and the principle of reason as a

242 Notes to Chapter 4

transcendental-ontological principle” that can “be closed only through an interpre-tive further-thinking of the text.”

31. In Gethmann’s terms, “the meaning of grounding [Begründung; justification]is first of all co-given through the Existenz of the ground itself.” Verstehen und Ausle-gung, p. 233.

32. T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1998), p. 17. Scanlon actually writes that a reason is something that“counts in favor” of something, which Tugendhat renders as “etwas, was für etwasspricht.”Tugendhat,“Heideggers ‘Man,’” p. 143. My reasons for preferring to trans-late back from the German will become obvious in the argument that follows.

33. It is tricky to specify just what this “speaking for” something amounts to, butit will involve a norm that governs a kind of success or failure. A reason might speakfor something by answering the question of why it should be that way, thus beingoriented toward the norm of the Good. Or it might be taken as evidence for believ-ing something, in which case it is oriented toward the norm of the True. A “justify-ing” reason is not simply a cause, which might bring something about but cannotspeak for it.

34. Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–84, has shown that such pre-predicative in-volvements are not prelinguistic, but she argues that the Humboldtian role Heideg-ger ascribes to language—as an essentially historical linguistic milieu that providesthe unhintergehbar horizon of all intelligibility—leads back to a version of Tugend-hat’s criticism. Because Heidegger holds that “entities are in no way accessible with-out an understanding of being,” he is trapped in a “linguistic idealism” that leaves noroom for a transhistorical normativity of reason, no possibility that the norms preva-lent within a certain historical “disclosure” could be rationally criticized or calledinto question, since all criticism and questioning depend on them. But the force ofsuch objections can be assessed only if one has first provided an adequate ontologi-cal account of reason and reasoning. Here I argue only that the necessary ontologi-cal account must begin with the notion of conscience, which is a mode of discoursethat is not bound to the Humboldtian historical linguistic milieu and offers differentaccess to the problem of critique.

35. I would argue that the following elements of a phenomenology of delibera-tion hold regarding moral deliberation as well, but to show this would require a sep-arate essay.

36. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press, 1985), p. 68, argues that “practical deliberation is in every casefirst-personal, and the first-person is not derivative or naturally replaced by anyone.”But Heidegger would respond that though the first-person is not derivative, “theself of everyday Dasein”—including the self who deliberates—“is the one-self ” (Be-ing and Time, p. 167/129); that is, already understands itself in typical ways and so, ina sense, as “anyone.” It is true, as Williams argues, that “the I of reflective practicaldeliberation is not required to take the result of anyone else’s properly conducteddeliberation as a datum” (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 69), but it neverthelessremains, in Heidegger’s terms,“dispersed into the ‘One’” and its way of interpreting


the situation (Being and Time, p. 167/129). For an account of how a genuine first-person is distinguished from the one-self see Steven Crowell, “Subjectivity: Locat-ing the First-Person in Being and Time,” Inquiry 44 (2001): 433–54.

37. Martin Heidegger,“What Is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, ed. David FarrellKrell, rev. and exp. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 103.

38. Ibid., p. 101.39. William Blattner,“The Concept of Death in Being and Time,” Man and World

27 (1994): 49–70.40. John Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existen-

tialism,” in Heidegger,Authenticity, and Modernity, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 65.

41. Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, p. 11.42. Hans-Georg Gadamer,“Rhetorik, Hermeneutik, Ideologiekritik,” in Gesam-

melte Werke (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1993), 2: 247.43. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World.44. This is, of course, something of an idealization. It is only in fully “mindless”

coping that the analogy between natural causes and factic social norms is fully com-pelling. Everyday life, as Heidegger recognizes, exhibits intermediate forms in which,in my ongoing practical engagement in some task, I am responsive to the normativedemands on me as normative. But this raises the question of how to account for suchresponsiveness, and I argue below that Heidegger gives such an account in terms ofconscience as “taking over being-a-ground.”

45. Martin Heidegger,“On the Essence of Ground,” Pathmarks, ed. William Mc-Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 106. Hereafter, cited as EG.

46. Heidegger goes on to criticize what becomes of this situation in Plato whenthe epekeina gets translated into a “realm of Ideas” and so our relation to world be-comes “noein, intuitus, as an apprehending that is no longer mediated, as ‘reason’”(EG, p. 125). This negative dismissal of “reason”—in scare quotes—is thoroughlytypical of Heidegger and demands an account, one that I hope to provide on an-other occasion.

47. Haugeland,“Truth and Rule-Following,” pp. 340ff. It follows that resolve orcommitment cannot itself be rationally grounded: I can give reasons for committingmyself to something, but those reasons will be normative only to the extent that Ihave already committed myself to them. As Haugeland puts it, “the governing ornormative ‘authority’ of an existential commitment comes from nowhere other thanitself, and it is brought to bear in no way other than by its own exercise” (p. 341).When Heidegger says that “only the resolution itself can give the answer” to thequestion of “what it is to resolve upon” (Being and Time, p. 345/298), this is not a re-jection of deliberation but a description of its ontological condition.

48. This should not be taken to mean that entities cannot show up unless I givesome reason for them propositionally. Rather,“what” beings are and “how” they aredemands such a practice of “referral.” Ontic truth in the sense of the “truth ofthings”—the self-showing of beings as they are in themselves—depends on Dasein’spractical dealings with them, in which constitutive standards are in play. What athing is, and how it is, thus depend on these standards, which have the structure ofreasons: this is a hammer because it serves thus and so, is produced thus and so, and


so on. But then, to say what and how beings are is always to imply a reference tothese standards and this, when made explicit, is to refer them to their grounds, thatis, to give reasons. This is just another way of saying that disposition and under-standing alone are not enough to account for intentionality; for “ontic truth”—something as something—some relation to “discourse” or language (in this case, thepossibility of offering constitutive standards as “reasons”) is also necessary.

49. I would like to thank those who criticized this paper, both at Rice Univer-sity and at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the International Society for Phenomeno-logical Studies at Asilomar, California, July 2003—in particular Cristina Lafont,Mark Wrathall, Mark Okrent,William Blattner, and Robert Pippin. I have not beenable to do full justice to their criticisms, but my thinking on this topic, if not thechapter itself, has been vastly improved by them.

chapter 5: transcendental truth

1. Being and Time, p. 269/226. All translations are by the author unless otherwisenoted.

2. Some examples: Da-sein is said to be “the ontic condition of the possibility ofdiscovering entities within the world at all” (Being and Time, p. 121/88); not onlyDasein, but the manner of being of every other sort of entity is disclosed in view of“the conditions of its possibility” (ibid., p. 184/145); the structure of care is “thecondition of the possibility” of existing authentically in an “anticipatory resolute-ness” (ibid., p. 365/317); the original time is “the condition of the possibility” of theeveryday experience of time (ibid., pp. 381ff./332ff.); a mode of the timing is “theexistential condition of the possibility” of relevance (ibid., p. 404/353).

3. See the oft-quoted remark by Martin Heidegger at the end of his lectures in thewinter semester of 1927–28, published as Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants“Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” ed. Ingtraud Görland, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 25 (Frankfurtam Main: Klostermann, 1977), p. 41: “Some years ago, as I studied the Critique ofPure Reason anew and read it against the backdrop of Husserl’s phenomenology, it isas though scales fell from my eyes, as it were, and Kant became for me an essentialconfirmation of the rightness of the path on which I searched.” On Heidegger’sKantian turn in the 1920s, also see John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of theHidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Theodore Kisiel, TheGenesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cal-ifornia Press, 1993); and Daniel O. Dahlstrom,“Heidegger’s Kantian Turn: Notes toHis Commentary of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” Review of Metaphysics 45, no. 2(December 1991): 329–61.

4. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), ed. Friedrich-Wil-helm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,1989), pp. 305, 351, 372.

5. In Besinnung, Heidegger lists the following treatments of truth: (1) his 1930 ad-dress,“On the Essence of Truth,” together with the interpretation of Plato’s allegoryof the cave in lectures of 1931–32; (2) his 1935 Freiburg address,“On the Origin ofthe Work of Art”; (3) his 1936 Frankfurt address by the same title; (4) his 1937–38lectures “On the Essence of Truth”; (5) his 1938 address “The Grounding of the


Modern Picture of the World by Means of Metaphysics”; (6) his remarks in the sec-ond volume of the lectures on Nietzsche, focusing on Untimely Considerations, § 6:truth and correctness, lesson 1938–39; (7) his 1939 lectures on Nietzsche (Will toPower, bk. 3:“The Will to Power as Knowledge”); (8) his 1936 Contributions to Philos-ophy, the section on grounding; (9) his lecture on Aristotle’s Physics, bk. 1, in the firsttrimester of 1940. See Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm vonHerrmann, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 66 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), p. 107.To this list we can add the discussion in Besinnung itself (ibid., pp. 107–23, 259 [“DieIrre”], 313–18), the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (“Brief über den ‘Humanismus’”) andpassages at the end of “Hegel and the Greeks” (“Hegel und die Griechen”); for thelatter two works, see Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herr-mann, 2nd exp. ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), pp. 311–60, 432–38.

6. Ermst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: deGruyter, 1967), p. 364.

7. Ernst Tugendhat,“Heideggers Idee der Wahrheit,” in Heidegger, ed. Otto Pögg-eler, 2nd ed. (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1970), pp. 296, 398. For criticismssimilar to those made by Tugendhat, see Karl Jaspers Notizen zu Martin Heidegger, ed.Hans Saner (Munich: Piper, 1978), pp. 78ff., 119ff., 129, 172, 223; and Karl Löwith,“Wahrheit und Geschichtlichkeit,” in Truth and Historicity, ed. Hans-Georg Gadamer(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972), p. 20.

8. Both retractions are to be found in Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens,2nd ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), pp. 77ff.; as for the claim about the essentialtransformation, see Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart:Reclam, 1960), 48ff.; Wegmarken, pp. 221, 228–36; Beiträge, p. 216; and Martin Hei-degger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet, ed. HermannMörchen, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 34 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988), pp. 17,131–44.

9. Karl-Otto Apel, “Regulative Ideas or Truth-Happening? An Attempt to An-swer the Question of the Conditions of the Possibility of Valid Understanding,” inThe Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: OpenCourt, 1996), p. 72.

10. Of course, one might argue that he should have retracted as much and thatApel’s reading and, for that matter,Tugendhat’s criticisms are generous since theyboth suggest how Heidegger’s analysis might be salvaged. But even if we might beinclined to make this argument, its trenchancy turns on answering the second ques-tion posed in this chapter.

11. Beiträge, p. 216. The story related here is an abbreviated form of that given byHeidegger on the same page of Beiträge. Because Plato has a sense that what itmeans to be is not completely filled by the account of ideas, he attempts to take thestep beyond (epekeina tes ousias) beings. But because his questioning is directed atbeings and not being itself, he can only determine that dimension beyond beings interms of a relation to human beings. Thus, the good (agathon) surfaces, not as adeeper understanding of beingness and beings, but as the evaluation of them (ibid.,pp. 209ff.).

12. Heidegger actually mentions five senses; I omit here the fifth sense of tran-scendence, so-called metaphysical transcendence, only for the sake of the economy


of the exposition. Metaphysical transcendence refers to any movement beyond fa-miliar and reliable entities to something else, as typified by the leading, metaphysicalquestion (what is the entity?), the answer to which requires looking away from theentity itself; cf. ibid., p. 218.

13. Ibid., pp. 252ff., 93ff.; in this connection, see note 3 above.14. Ibid., p. 2. Despite these criticisms in the Beiträge, Heidegger does not seem

to think that the ontological difference has completely outlived its usefulness; for apositive take on it, see ibid., pp. 258, 287.

15. See Heidegger’s criticism of the misleading way that thrownness is character-ized in Being and Time; Beiträge, p. 318.

16. Ibid., p. 251; see, too, pp. 254, 262.17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Lon-

don: Macmillan, 1968),A598/B626.18. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., Pe-

ter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), pp. 94ff.:“But as ’tis certain there is a greatdifference betwixt the simple conception of the existence of an object, and the be-lief of it, and as this difference lies not in the parts or composition of the idea,which we conceive; it follows, that it must lie in the manner, in which we conceiveit.” Gottlob Frege, Begriffschrift und andere Aufsätze, ed. Ignacio Angelelli, 2nd ed.(Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), § 2, pp. 1ff.:“Wenn man denkleinen senkrechten Strich am linken Ende des wagerechten fortläßt, so soll dies dasUrtheil in eine blosse Vorstellungsverbindung verwandeln, von welcher der Schreibendenicht ausdrückt, ob er ihr Wahrheit zuerkenne oder nicht [If one leaves off the small,vertical stroke an the left end of the horizontal one, then this is supposed to trans-form the judgment into a mere combination of representations, regarding which thewriter does not express whether he attributes truth to it or not].”

19. Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 75.20. Sein und Zeit, p. 220; see, too, Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit

(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1949), p. 12.21. Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 76.

chapter 6: the descent of the ‘logos’

1. Thomas Aquinas, Questiones disputatae de veritate, qu. 1, art. 1.2. Being and Time, p. 270/227.3. Friedrich Nietzsche,“Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne,”

Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, vol. 1 (Munich:Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1980), p. 875;“On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” inPhilosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. anded. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79.

4. Being and Time, p. 272/229.5. Ibid., p. 204/161.6. See Steven Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward

Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001).7. Heidegger, review of Autorität und Freiheit: Betrachtungen zum Kulturproblem der

Kirche (1910), by Friedrich Wilhelm Förster, in Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere


Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, ed. Hermann Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16 (Frank-furt am Main: Klostermann, 2000), p. 8. All translations are the author’s unless oth-erwise noted.

8. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt an Main:Campus, 1988), p. 65.

9. Review of Förster, Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 8; Ott, Martin Heidegger, pp.63–64.

10. Review of Förster, Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 7.11. Martin Heidegger, “Nur Noch ein Gott Kann Uns Retten,” Der Spiegel 23

(1976): 193–219; trans. “‘Only a God Can Save Us’:The Spiegel Interview (1966),”trans. William J. Richardson, in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. ThomasSheehan (Chicago: Precedent, n.d.), pp. 45–67.

12. Being and Time, p. 443/391.13. “Zur philosophischen Orientierung für Akademiker,” p. 11.14. Ibid. 15. Ibid.16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 12.18. Such an insistence on Eigenentwicklung has to call into question all talk of the

Befehlscharakter of church dogma and Dieter Thomä’s claim that such questioningcame only much later. Already in 1910 Heidegger’s relationship to the Church wasnot untroubled. See Dieter Thomä, Die Zeit des Selbst und die Zeit danach: Zur Kritikder Textgeschichte Martin Heideggers (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 39.

19. “Zur philosophischen Orientierung für Akademiker,” p. 12.20. Ibid.21. “Per mortem ad vitam: Gedanken über Jörgensens ‘Lebenslüge und Lebens-

wahrheit’” (1910), in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 5.22. Review of Förster, Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 7.23. In Being and Time Heidegger connects such a strengthening with authentic

being unto death: “But the phenomenon of this authentic potentiality-for-Beingalso opens our eyes for the constancy of the Self in the sense of its having achievedsome sort of position” (p. 369/322). But leaping over the world, such constancy isin principle incapable of providing the required orientation. See Harries, “Deathand Utopia:Towards a Critique of the Ethics of Satisfaction,” Research in Phenome-nology 7 (1977): 138–52.

24. “Neuere Forschungen über Logik,” in Frühe Schriften (1912–1916), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,1978), p. 23.

25. Thomä, Die Zeit des Selbst, p. 42.26. Heidegger, Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus, in Frühe Schriften (1912–

1916), Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1, p. 88.27. Heidegger, “Phänomenologie und Theologie,” in Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-

Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,1979), p. 51.

28. Ibid., p. 53.29. Ibid., p. 66.30. Ibid., p. 6.


31. “Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger,” inKant und das Problem der Metaphysik, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesam-tausgabe, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), p. 277.

32. Ibid., p. 278. 33. Ibid., p. 285.34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., p. 286.36. Ibid., p. 276. 37. Being and Time, p. 74/49.38. Ibid.; trans. of original Latin, p. 74/49, n. viii.39. Ibid., p. 75/49, n. ix; trans. of original German.40. “Davoser Disputation,” p. 282.41. Martin Heideger,“The Rectorial Address,” trans. Lisa Harries, in Martin Hei-

degger and National Socialism, ed. Günther Neske and Emil Kettering (New York:Paragon, 1990), pp. 6–7.

42. “Davoser Disputation,” p. 286.43. Ibid.44. Ibid., p. 287.45. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:

Hackett, 1987), para. 26, p. 111.46. Ibid., p. 111. 47. Being and Time, p. 289/245.48. Ibid., p. 353/305. 49. Ibid., p. 369/322.50. Ibid., p. 367/320. 51. “On Truth and Lies,” p. 84.52. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmil-

lan, 1968),A235–36/B294–95.53. “On Truth and Lies,” p. 82. 54. Ibid., p. 87.55. Ibid., p. 88. 56. Being and Time, p. 101/71.57. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann,

Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), p. 96.58. Being and Time, p. 101/71.59. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Kloster-

mann, 1972), pp. 7–68; here p. 36;“The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Martin Hei-degger, Poetry, Language,Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper andRow, 1971), pp. 17–87; here p. 47.

60. Martin Heidegger, “ . . . dichterisch wohnet der Mensch . . . ,” in Vorträge und Auf-sätze, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main:Klostermann, 2000), p. 200. Poem from Hölderlin’s fragment “In himmlische Bläue.”

61. Martin Heidegger,“Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung,” in Erläuterungenzu Hölderlins Dichtung, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996), p. 41.

62. Ibid., p. 45.63. “ . . . dichterisch wohnet der Mensch . . . ,” p. 151.64. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Royal Prussian

[later German] Academy of Sciences, vol. 5 (Berlin: Georg Reimer [later Walter deGruyter], 1900–),“Einleitung” and paras. 49, 57, and 59.

65. “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,1985), p. 91.


66. Einführung in die Metaphysik, ed. Petra Jaeger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 40 (Frank-furt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), pp. 143, 141.

67. Ibid., p. 143. 68. Ibid., p. 91.69. Ibid., p. 139. 70. Being and Time, p. 204/161.

chapter 7: letting be

1. Being and Time, pp. 117ff./84ff. All translations are the author’s unless otherwisenoted.

2. Ibid., p. 154/118.3. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: In-

diana University Press, 1982), § 11b.4. Being and Time, p. 414/363. 5. Ibid., p. 255/212.6. Ibid., p. 269/226. 7. Ibid., p. 269/227.

chapter 8: heidegger and the synthetic a priori

1. Theodor Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1993), p. 408.

2. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” trans. ParvisEmad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 289.

3. Here I will not focus on how Heidegger’s hermeneutic idealism is in turnrooted in his temporal idealism. On the latter see the excellent analysis of WilliamBlattner in his book Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999). I basically agree with Blattner’s account of Heidegger’s temporal ideal-ism, but I think that such an account needs to be complemented with an analysis ofthe hermeneutic idealism that Heidegger derives from it in order to understand thespecific features that he ascribes to our experience, as well as the reasons for hisstrong apriorism. In my view Heidegger’s hermeneutic idealism is the key to un-derstanding why he sees himself justified in inferring from his temporal idealism the“aggressively anti-empirical” understanding of science as being based on an a priorifoundation, as Blattner ascribes to him in his article “Laying the Ground for Meta-physics: Heidegger’s Appropriation of Kant” (in The Cambridge Companion to Heideg-ger, ed. Charles Guignon, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006],pp. 149–76). I surely agree with Blattner’s claim that Heidegger has in fact notearned the right to such a view, but in my opinion this can only be shown througha critical analysis of Heidegger’s arguments in support of his hermeneutic idealism,as I try to do here.

4. Right at the beginning of his lectures Heidegger makes it clear that the syn-thetic a priori is Kant’s crucial discovery, that it concerns the understanding of beingor ontological knowledge, and that it is the fundamental problem of the Critique ofPure Reason: “The fundamental discovery of Kant consists in the realization thatthese peculiar kinds of knowledge—the preontological understanding of the beingof entities and all ontological knowledge—are such as to contain an extension ofthe knowledge of entities while remaining nonetheless a knowledge which is freefrom experience and pure. Synthetic judgments a priori are knowledge of this kind.


But for Kant this discovery is not the result of his investigation, but its beginning.How are such judgments possible? The inquiry into the ground of the possibility ofontological knowledge constitutes the fundamental question of the Critique of PureReason” (Phenomenological Interpretations, p. 35).

5. Ibid., p. 38; emphasis in original.6. In What Is a Thing? (trans. W. B. Barton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch [Chicago: Reg-

nery, 1967]), Heidegger makes the following remark about Kant’s principle:“Who-ever understands this principle understands Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Whoeverunderstand this . . . masters a fundamental condition [Grundstellung] of our histori-cal existence, which we can neither avoid, leap over, nor deny in any way” (p. 183).

7. Being and Time, pp. 25–26/6. Here I agree with Blattner’s claim, in “Is Heideg-ger a Kantian Idealist?” (Inquiry 37 [1994]: 185–201), that Heidegger’s equation ofthese two senses of being constitutes a substantive, idealist thesis and is not just theexpression of a convention or definition of the term “being” as meaning merely“intelligibility for Dasein.” I also agree with Blattner’s analysis of the parallelism be-tween Kant’s and Heidegger’s attempts at combining idealism and realism. However,I think that his analysis could be made clearer by paying attention to Heidegger’sdistinction between “being” in the sense of existence and “being” in the sense ofessence. See notes 10 and 11.

8. Being and Time, p. 251/208.9. Ibid., 26/6. As he explains it in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic:“Because

being ‘is’ not, and thus is never along with other beings, there is no proper sense atall or legitimacy in asking what the being of beings in themselves is. . . . We alwaysknow only beings, but never being as such a being. This becomes clear from thenature of transcendence and the ontological difference.” Metaphysical Foundations ofLogic (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik), trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: In-diana University Press, 1984), p. 153.

10. Heidegger remarks in Being and Time:“With Dasein’s factical existence, enti-ties within-the-world are already encountered too. The fact that such entities arediscovered along with Dasein’s own “there” of existence, is not left to Dasein’s dis-cretion. Only what it discovers and discloses on occasion, in what direction it doesso, how and how far it does so—only these are matters for Dasein’s freedom, even ifalways within the limitations of its thrownness” (Being and Time, p. 417/366).

11. Here I share Herman Philipse’s impression, when he remarks, in Heidegger’sPhilosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1998), that “probably there is no interpretation of Heidegger’s transcendentaltheory that is compatible with all texts” (p. 433). This seems especially compellingin light of the question that Philipse poses, namely, how is it that entities do not de-pend on Dasein, if their being depends on Dasein and the relation of “dependingon” is transitive? But, precisely in light of this question, I find Philipse’s interpreta-tion of Heidegger as a transdencental realist to be much more problematic than anyof the idealist alternatives. Regardless of its tenability, Heidegger’s way of avoidingthe problem that Philipse’s question poses is through the sharp distinction betweenessence and existence. This is what makes the relation “depending on” intransitive.For it implies that two entirely different dependencies are at issue: the essence of en-tities depends on Dasein, whereas their existence does not. Accordingly, the most


one can claim is that entities exist independently of Dasein, not what entities thereare. For “there is no proper sense at all or legitimacy in asking what is the being ofentities-in-themselves” (Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, p. 153). If this is the case,though, the claim that entities exist independently of Dasein entails only a commit-ment to the (ontologically very weak) claim that something or other exists, but it can-not entail what transcendental realism requires: a commitment to the existence ofspecific entities with specific essences. As Heidegger makes clear in his discussion ofidealism and realism in Being and Time, the truth of idealism lies precisely in recog-nizing that distinguishing some entities from others requires a prior projection oftheir being, and that such a projection is dependent on Dasein. Of course, that Hei-degger would like to be a (consistent) idealist does not mean that he succeeds (evenin his own terms). But, in my opinion, the inconsistencies that one may find insome passages are due to the very instability of his hermeneutic idealism and not toany attempt (or any temptation) on his part to defend a transcendental realism. Ashe makes crystal clear in Being and Time,“in realism there is a lack of ontological un-derstanding” (p. 251/207), for “realism tries to explain reality ontically by real con-nections of interaction between things that are real” (ibid.). This is why, in his opin-ion, “as compared with realism, idealism . . . has an advantage in principle,” and,provided it does not misunderstand itself in psychological terms, “idealism affordsthe only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic” (ibid.).

12. Here I follow Henry Allison’s interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealismas the logical consequence of accepting Kant’s claims about the epistemic condi-tions of human experience (see Kant’s Transcendental Idealism [New Haven, CT:YaleUniversity Press, 1983], pp. 10ff.). Similarly, I see Heidegger’s hermeneutic idealismas the logical consequence of accepting Heidegger’s claims about the hermeneuticconditions of human experience.

13. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, 4th ed. (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 8–9.

14. In Being and Time Heidegger defines the structure of the “always already” as“a perfect tense a priori, which characterizes the kind of being belonging to Daseinitself ” (p. 117/85), and equates it with Kant’s transcendental a priori without furthertheoretical explanation. In his personal copy of the book, Heidegger explains the“prior” character of the projection in the following terms: “‘Prior’ in this ontologi-cal sense is called ‘a priori’ in Latin and proteron te phusei in Greek (Aristotle, PhysicsA I). . . . Not something that is ontically past, but rather that which is in each case ear-lier, that to which we will point back in the question concerning entities as such; in-stead of ‘a priori perfect’, it could also be called an ‘ontological’ or ‘transcendental’perfect (cf. Kant’s Doctrine of the Schematism)” (Sein und Zeit,“Randbermerkun-gen,” pp. 441–42, 85b. The reference here is to the German edition alone, as theRandbermerkungen do not appear in the English translation.

15. Ibid., p. 264.16. Ibid., p. 265.17. See ibid., p. 414.18. W. V. O. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1981), p. 102. Needless to say, the coincidence between Quine and Heideggersuggested here concerns exclusively the acceptance of the maxim (i.e., their com-


mon conviction that it is meaningless to purport to refer to entities whose condi-tions of identity one cannot possibly indicate). This acceptance, in turn, commitsboth authors to the assumption that “meaning determines reference within eachfixed ontology,” to put it in Quine’s terms (in “The Elusiveness of Reference,” inSprache,Theorie und Wirklichkeit, ed. Michael Sukale [Frankfurt: Lang, 1990], p. 22).However, with regard to the further issues that follow from this acceptance (such aswhich criteria of identity or principles of individuation are acceptable, etc.), theirviews are indeed extremely different.

19. The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, trans. Ted Sadler(London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 1–2; my italics. Similarly, Heidegger explains inWhat Is a Thing? “If we become acquainted with this rifle or even a determinatemodel of rifle, we do not learn for the first time what a weapon is. Rather, we al-ready know this in advance and must know it, otherwise we could not at all perceivethe rifle as such. When we know in advance what a weapon is, and only then, doeswhat we see lying before us become visible in that which it is” (p. 72). In order tofocus on the strongest, that is, most charitable interpretation of Heidegger’s claim, Idisregard here the extent to which in Heidegger’s opinion our understanding of thebeing of entities determines any possible experience of those entities. Examples canbe found in most of Heidegger’s works. In Being and Time, Heidegger claims that“entities can be experienced ‘factually’ only when being is already understood” (Beingand Time, p. 363/315; my italics). Along the same lines, in Basic Questions of Philoso-phy (trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer [Bloomington: Indiana Univer-sity Press, 1994]), he explains: “Ever in accordance with how we gather [erblicken]essence and to what extent we do so, we are also able to experience and to deter-mine what is particular about things. That which stands in view in advance, andhow it thus stands, decides what we in fact see in each particular case” (p. 65; my ital-ics). In What Is a Thing? Heidegger makes explicit his view that our preunderstand-ing determines our perception in the following terms:“What we call hypothesis inscience is the first step toward an essentially different, conceptual representation asover against mere perceptions. Experience does not arise ‘empirically’ from perception, butrather is enabled metaphysically: through a new, anticipatory conceptual representation peculiarto what is given” (pp. 139–40; my italics).

20. Here I use the expression for us in order to make explicit the weak readingthat Heidegger always suggests, when he tries to convince us of the trivially correctnature of his claim. The expression that Heidegger uses is as such. This expression ismore ambiguous, for it admits of both a “realist” and a “hermeneutic” interpreta-tion. But to the extent that one can read it in the latter sense (i.e., as a shorthand ofthe expression as so understood) Heidegger’s claim may still be seen as trivially cor-rect: our understanding of what entities are determines what these entities are assuch (i.e., as so understood). A very clear example of this use of the expression canbe found in Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” whereHeidegger explains:“It is in dealing with things that we understand, from the veryoutset, what something like a tool or things for use generally mean. We do not de-velop this understanding in the course of use. On the contrary, we must already un-derstand ahead of time something like tool and tool-character, in order to set aboutusing a certain tool. . . . In the same way we always already understand in advance


what the power of nature means and only in the light of this pre-understanding of na-ture’s power can a specific force of nature as such overwhelm us” (p. 22; my italics). Here itis pretty clear that we must interpret the expression as such in the hermeneutic senseof as so understood. Otherwise we would not get a more or less trivial claim, but apatently false one. However, even if we grant Heidegger the weak reading, I thinkthat his view is wrong nonetheless. See next note.

21. Here I agree with Philipse’s claim in Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being that Hei-degger’s position is a variety of weak transcendentalism. This is certainly correct tothe extent that Heidegger does not accept Husserl’s transcendental idealism; that is,Heidegger’s claims about the being of entities are supposed to concern only theiressence and not their existence. However, my assessment of what makes Heidegger’sweak transcendentalism nontrivial varies from Philipse’s. According to Philipse, Hei-degger’s acceptance of meaning holism is what gives a Kantian flavor to Heidegger’sposition and distinguishes it from “the trivial view that humans give significance topre-existing things.” However, meaning holism seems perfectly compatible with thetrivial view. Moreover, to the extent that it only concerns the question of how wegive significance to things (namely, in a holistic rather than in an atomistic way), it ishard to see what is specifically Kantian about it. For it does not seem to have anybearing on the issue whether our experience of entities is determined by our priorunderstanding of their being. In my opinion, the Kantian flavor of the latter claimhas a different origin, namely, Heidegger’s assumption that meaning determines ref-erence. Only the combination of meaning holism with this further claim rendersHeidegger’s view of our experience as determined by a holistic and prior under-standing of being incompatible with the trivial view. But precisely in light of thisincompatibility Heidegger’s hermeneutic idealism cannot be seen as weak in thesense of trivially correct. Far from trivial, its correctness essentially depends on thecorrectness of the assumption that meaning determines reference. I certainly agreethat the hermeneutic reasons that Heidegger provides to support his view are meantto reduce it to the apparently trivial claim that our understanding of what entitiesare determines what these entities are for us. But this claim is not as trivial as it maysound. In fact, I think that it is false. For an essential component of our understand-ing of what entities are is precisely that they may be different from what and howwe understand them as being.This trivial view is anchored in our use of designatingexpressions as directly referential (i.e., in the fact that, contrary to Heidegger’s as-sumption, the meaning of the designative expressions we use does not determinetheir reference). I develop this argument at greater length in chapter 4 of my bookHeidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000).

22. Being and Time, p. 194/152.23. Needless to say, for Heidegger the circle of understanding is not merely a fact

about philological interpretation, but “the expression of the existential fore-structureof Dasein itself ” (ibid., p. 195/152). Moreover, Heidegger is confident that he willbe able to trace the fore-structure of understanding back to Dasein’s originary tem-porality (see ibid., § 69, p. 360/312).

24. Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indi-ana University Press, 1982), p. 72.


25. Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. Otto Saame and Ina Saame-Speidel, Gesam-tausgabe, vol. 27 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2001), pp. 222–23. Along thesame lines, in Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” he ex-plains: “The genesis of a science originates in the objectification of a realm of be-ings, that is, in the development of an understanding of the constitution of the be-ing of the respective beings. . . . Through objectification, i.e., through opening upthe ontological constitution, science first obtains a basis and a ground and circum-scribes its field of investigation at the same time” (pp. 20 and 23).

26. See What Is a thing? pp. 49–82, esp. pp. 70–73. I offer a much more detailedanalysis of this text in chapter 5 of my Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure.

27. In What Is a Thing? Heidegger explains:

Regarding what the object is in accordance with its objective essence, we must alwaysalready have a material knowledge, according to Kant a synthetic knowledge, in advance,a priori. Without synthetic judgments a priori, objects could never stand over against usas such, objects toward which we “then” direct ourselves, i.e. in special investigations andinquiries, and to which we constantly appeal. Synthetic judgments a priori are alreadyasserted in all scientific judgments. They are pre-judgments in a genuine and necessarysense. . . . There is no presuppositionless science because the essence of science consistsin such presupposing, in such pre-judgments about the object. (p. 180)

28. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 11–14.29. Being and Time, p. 414/362–63.30. For a clear illustration of the extent to which Heidegger feels justified in

keeping this feature of Kant’s transcendental idealism after its hermeneutic transfor-mation, see the example he discusses in Basic Questions of Philosophy (pp. 59–60) tosupport his claim that perception cannot contradict our preunderstanding.

31. What Is a Thing? p. 90.32. Basic Questions, pp. 52–53; my italics.33. What Is a Thing? pp. 78–79; my italics.34. Being and Time, p. 269/226.35. As Heidegger remarks in his lectures of the summer semester of 1934, Logik:

Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (ed. Walter Biemel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 21 [Frankfurt amMain: Klostermann, 1995]),“there is no absolute truth for us” (p. 36). Earlier in hislectures of the winter semester of 1923–24,Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung(ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 17 [Frankfurt am Main:Klostermann, 1994]), he already indicates that “it could well be that the idea of ab-solute validity is meaningless” (p. 96).

36. For a very illuminating account of Putnam’s conception of the contextually apriori, see Axel Mueller, Referenz und Fallibilismus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), pp.106–36.

37. “Rethinking Mathematical Necessity,” in Words and Life, by Hilary Putnam,ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 255–56.

38. As will soon become clear, in contradistinction to Heidegger, the other tra-ditional feature of the notion of apriority, namely, that a priori statements are neces-sarily true and thus cannot turn out to be false, will not be preserved in Putnam’sapproach.


39. “‘Two Dogmas’ Revisited,” in Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, by HilaryPutnam, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 95.

40. “Rethinking Mathematical Necessity,” pp. 255–56.41. Ibid., p. 251.42. “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” in Mathematics, Matter, and Method: Philosophical Pa-

pers, by Hilary Putnam, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1975),p. 240.

43. On this point see Gary Ebbs, “Putnam and the Contextually A Priori,” inThe Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Lewis E. Hahn and Randall E. Auxier (La Salle,IL: Open Court, forthcoming). In “Rethinking Mathematical Necessity,” Putnampoints at some terminological corrections he would introduce if he were to rewrite“It Ain’t Necessarily So” in order to avoid possible misunderstandings: “If I werewriting ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ today, I would alter the terminology somewhat.Since it seems odd to call statements which are false ‘necessary’ (even if one adds‘relative to the body of knowledge B’), I would say ‘quasi-necessary relative to bodyof knowledge B.’ Since a ‘body of knowledge’, in the sense in which I used theterm, can contain (what turn out later to be) false statements, I would replace ‘bodyof knowledge’ with ‘conceptual scheme’” (p. 251).

44. It should be clear that Heidegger incorporates this feature of the traditionalconception of apriority into his interpretation of the ontological difference, accord-ing to which there is an absolute (and permanent) distinction between ontic andontological knowledge.

45. Putnam’s argument against such an empiricist approach is basically that “toidentify ‘empirical’ and ‘synthetic’ is to lose a useful distinction” (“RethinkingMathematical Necessity,” p. 251). In “‘Two Dogmas’ Revisited” he explains his ar-gument more in detail:

Giving up the idea that there are any absolutely a priori statements requires us to also giveup the correlative idea (at least it was correlative for the empiricists) that a posteriori state-ments . . . are always and at all times “empirical” in the sense that they have specifiableconfirming experiences and specifiable disconfirming experiences. Euclidean geometrywas always revisable in the sense that no justifiable canon of scientific inquiry forbade theconstruction of an alternative geometry; but it was not always “empirical” in the sense ofhaving an alternative that good scientists could actually conceive. (p. 95)

46. Putnam discusses here only one of the possible lines of argument to supportthe view that a priori and a posteriori are permanent statuses of statements, namely,the positivist’s strategy of assimilating the “synthetic a priori” status to the status of“analytic in virtue of the meaning of the terms.”Another line of argument, though,would be to claim that if something turns out to be empirically false, it cannot havebeen a priori precisely for that reason (by definition, so to speak). In the examplediscussed by Putnam this argument would first require distinguishing between pureand applied geometry and then claiming that the latter belongs to the (a posteriori)empirical sciences and not to (a priori) mathematics. On the basis of this distinctionit would be possible to argue that what turned out to be false as a consequence ofthe acceptance of Einstein’s theory was not Euclidean geometry, as such, but only a


specific theory of space that belongs to the empirical sciences, namely, that the geo-metrical structure of physical space is Euclidean ( Jerrold J. Katz follows this line ofargument in Realistic Rationalism [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997], pp. 49ff.). Theproblematic consequence of this proposal is, as Quine expresses it, that “it puts . . .geometry qua interpreted theory of space, outside mathematics altogether” (“Car-nap and Logical Truth,” in The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, by W.V. O. Quine[New York: Random House, 1966], p. 117). Putnam refers to this interpretative al-ternative very briefly with the following remark:“Unless one accepts the ridiculousclaim that what seemed a priori was only the conditional statement that if Euclid’s ax-ioms, then Euclid’s theorems (I think that this is what Quine calls ‘disinterpreting’geometry in ‘Carnap and Logical Truth’), then one must admit that the key proposi-tions of Euclidean geometry were interpreted propositions . . . and these interpretedpropositions were methodologically immune from revision (prior to the inventionof rival theory)” (“‘Two Dogmas’ Revisited,” p. 94).

47. “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” p. 248.48. See What Is a Thing? pp. 66–95.49. In fact, Heidegger not only claims that the Aristotelian approach did not turn

out to be empirically false; in addition, he claims that it is actually “more true” thanthe modern approach inaugurated by Newton. In Basic Questions of Philosophy, heexplains that modern science is “not a whit more true than Greek science. On the con-trary, it is much more untrue, since it remains completely bound up with its method-ology, and for all its discoveries it lets that which is actually the object of these dis-coveries slip away: nature, the relation of human beings to it, and their attitudewithin it” (p. 53; my italics).

50. In his History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (trans. Theodore Kisiel[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985]), Heidegger claims that “all of geom-etry as such is proof of the existence of a material apriori” (p. 101). As is wellknown,“material apriori” is Husserl’s term for synthetic a priori knowledge (see hisIdeen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Husserliana,vol. 3 [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976], § 16). In his so far published work, Heideggernever discusses the issue of non-Euclidean geometries, nor is there any evidencethat he ever came to doubt that the knowledge of geometry is synthetic a priori.

51. “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” p. 240.52. Ibid.; emphasis in original.53. Ibid., pp. 240–41.54. Of course, Putnam’s attack is targeted toward the logical positivist attempt to

get rid of the synthetic a priori status of statements, by first interpreting such state-ments as meaning postulates and subsequently reducing their alleged synthetic sta-tus to the status of “analytic in virtue of the meaning of the terms” (i.e., true by lin-guistic convention). On the similarities and differences between this attempt andHeidegger’s, see chapter 5 of my Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure.

55. Heidegger makes this view explicit in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology,when he explains that a prior projection of an understanding of the being of enti-ties as equipment is what makes possible to individuate any specific equipmental en-tity as such:


Equipment is encountered always within an equipmental contexture. Each single pieceof equipment carries this contexture along with it, and it is this equipment only with re-gard to that contexture. The specific thisness of a piece of equipment, its individuation, ifwe take the word in a completely formal sense, is not determined primarily by space andtime in the sense that it appears in a determinate space- and time-position. Instead, whatdetermines a piece of equipment as an individual is its equipmental character and equip-mental contexture. . . . A being of the nature of equipment is thus encountered as thebeing that it is in itself if and when we understand beforehand the following: functional-ity, functionality relations, functionality totality. . . . [That is,] if we have already before-hand projected this entity upon functionality relation.” (pp. 292–93; italics in original)

I am grateful to Mark Okrent for pointing me to that passage.56. Although Putnam always sticks to the term realism in order to characterize

his philosophical approach, given the drastic transformations that this approach hassuffered throughout the years, the exact sense of his realism is not always clear.However, that “transcendental idealism” is not one of these possible senses is an ex-plicit claim of Putnam’s. In his “Replies” (Philosophical Topics 20 [1992]), he writes:“Like Strawson, I believe that there is much insight in Kant’s critical philosophy, in-sight that we can inherit and restate; but Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’ is not partof that insight” (p. 366).

57. Putnam explains this view with an example from physics as well:

“Momentum is not the product of mass and velocity” once had no sense; but it is partof Einstein’s achievement that the sense he gave those words seems now inevitable. We“translate” old physics texts homophonically, for the most part; certainly we “translate”momentum homophonically. We do not say that the word “momentum” used not to re-fer, or used to refer to a quantity that was not conserved; rather we say that the old the-ory was wrong in thinking that momentum was exactly mv. And we believe that wiseproponents of the old theory would have accepted our correction had they known whatwe know. (“Rethinking Metaphysical Necessity,” p. 257)

58. In “Rethinking Metaphysical Necessity,” Putnam makes clear that this crite-rion for the distinction between contextually a priori and a posteriori statementsshould not be interpreted in psychological terms:

I would further emphasize the nonpsychological character of the distinction by pointingout that the question is not a mere question of what some people can imagine or notimagine; it is a question of what, given a conceptual scheme, one knows how to falsifyor at least disconfirm. Prior to Lobachevski, Riemann, and others, no one knew how todisconfirm Euclidean geometry, or even knew if anything could disconfirm it. . . . I dobelieve that this distinction, the distinction between what is necessary and what is em-pirical relative to a conceptual scheme, is worth studying even if (or especially if ) it isnot a species of analytic-synthetic distinction.” (pp. 251–52)

chapter 9: heidegger’s topology of being

1. Letter (1802), in Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1984). The larger passage of which this is a part is dis-


cussed by Heidegger in “Hölderlin’s Heaven and Earth,” Elucidations of Hölderlin’sPoetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), pp. 175–207.

2. See Gadamer,“Reflections on my Philosophical Journey,” in The Philosophy ofHans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn, Library of Living Philosophers 24(Chicago: Open Court, 1997), p. 47.

3. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language,Thought, trans. AlbertHofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 41–43.

4. Ontology:The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: In-diana University Press, 1999), p. 5.

5. Ibid., p. 68.6. Ibid., p. 62.7. Ibid., p. 69.8. Donald Davidson,“Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in A. J.Ayer: Memorial Es-

says, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 30 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 153–66.

9. Being and Time, pp. 105/74–75.10. I have argued elsewhere that just such a circular structure characterizes the

transcendental. See my “The Transcendental Circle,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy75 (1997): 1–20.

11. Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations, Letters, trans. Franz Mayrand Richard Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 115.

12. Being and Time, p. 170/130.13. “Martin Heidegger: 75Years,” in Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Al-

bany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 17.14. See my discussion of this idea in Place and Experience:A Philosophical Topogra-

phy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).15. This conception of the transcendental is one that I have developed else-

where, notably in “The Transcendental Circle”; but see also “From the Transcenden-tal to the Topological,” in From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Tran-scendental, ed. Jeff Malpas (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 80–86.

16. In “Kehre and Ereignis:A Prolegomenon to Introduction to Metaphysics,” in ACompanion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics,” ed. Richard Polt and GregoryFried (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 3–16,Thomas Sheehan ar-gues that the “Turning” (Kehre) refers to the turning in thinking that is tied up withthe Ereignis and not to the change (Wendung) that occurred historically in Heideg-ger’s thinking between 1930 and 1936. Sheehan’s point is well-taken, but it seems tome that it gives too much emphasis to the difference here and not enough to theway in which the change in Heidegger’s thinking is itself an instance of the turningin thinking as such. The ambiguity that obtains here is one that recurs in a numberof places in Heidegger’s discussion of these matters and of which Heidegger wouldseem to be well aware.

17. See “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed.William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 256. Also Sem-inare, ed. Curd Ochwadt, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,1986), p. 366.


18. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 256; Being and Time, p. 38/68.19. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 257.20. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: In-

diana University Press, 1984), pp. 160 and 165–66. Compare:

Transcendence means surpassing [Übersteig]. . . . Transcendence in the terminologicalsense to be clarified and demonstrated means something that properly pertains to humanDasein . . . it belongs to human Dasein as the fundamental constitution of this being,one that occurs prior to all comportment. . . . If one chooses the title of “subject” forthat being that we ourselves in each case are and that we understand as “Dasein”, thenwe may say that transcendence designates the essence of the subject, that it is the funda-mental structure of subjectivity. . . .We name world that toward which Dasein as such tran-scends, and shall now determine transcendence as being-in-the-world.

“On the Essence of Ground,” in Pathmarks, pp. 108–9.21. The focus on transcendence, but understood specifically in relation to the

problem of “world,” is also a central preoccupation in Heidegger’s work in the pe-riod of the late 1920s, including The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (MetaphysischeAnfangsgründe der Logik; 1928) and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (DieGrundbegriffe der Metaphysik; from 1929–30).

22. As Heidegger notes in The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, 1996): “Kant names ‘transcendent’ that which liesbeyond the limits of human experience, not insofar as it surpasses objects in the di-rection of their objectness; rather insofar as its surpasses objects along with their ob-jectness—and this without sufficient warrant, namely, without the possibility of be-ing founded” (p. 78).

23. See ibid.24. Preface to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, 4th ed.

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. xv.25. Contributions to Philosophy ( from Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth

Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), § 199, p. 226.26. Ibid., § 172, p. 208.27. “In Contributions, Heidegger speaks of ‘Da-sein’ with a hyphen, which indi-

cates a shift in his notion of Dasein as he conceived it in Being and Time. Da-seinnow designates not primarily the essence of human being but rather the open mid-dle of the truth of beyng as enowning.” Daniela Vallega-Neu, “Poietic Saying,” inCompanion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, ed. Charles E. Scott, Susan M.Scoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Vallega (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 2001), p. 73. See Contributions to Philosophy, §§ 190–91.

28. Contributions to Philosophy, § 200, p. 227.29. Ibid., § 191, p. 219.30. Ibid., § 7, p. 19.31. “The Way in the Turn,” in Heidegger’s Ways, pp. 129–30.32. “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being,

trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 73 (first published in1964).


33. See, once again, “From the Transcendental to the Topological.” Heidegger isperhaps the only thinker in whose work the idea of topology is made explicit interms that directly address the idea of topos. However, I would argue that such atopology is also a central element in the work of a number of key thinkers. See, forinstance, my discussions of the work of Donald Davidson in papers such as “Locat-ing Interpretation:The Topography of Understanding in Heidegger and Davidson,”Philosophical Topics 27 (1999): 129–48.

34. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language,Thought, pp. 152–53.35. Of course, both “Homecoming” (“Heimkunft”) and “Remembrance” (“An-

denken”) name poems by Hölderlin that are the focus for separate lectures by Hei-degger. See “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones” and “Remembrance,” in Elucidationsof Hölderlin’s Poetry, pp. 23–50 and 101–74. On remembrance see also Heidegger,Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1993), pp. 54ff.

36. “Conversation on a Country Path,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M.Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 66.

37. “Hölderlin’s Heaven and Earth,” p. 188.38. There is some indication of this in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), ed.

Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65 (Frankfurt am Main:Klostermann, 1989), § 266, pp. 327–30. The relation between identity and differenceis, of course, a major theme in the two lectures contained in Heidegger, Identity andDifference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

39. Heidegger,“Cézanne,” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, 1910–1976, ed. HermannHeidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), p. 223.

40. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” in Seminare, p. 344.41. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 253.42. Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: In-

diana University Press, 1992), p. 149.43. In the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Heidegger writes:

In the lecture on Hölderlin’s elegy “Homecoming” (1943) [the] . . . nearness “of” being,which the Da of Dasein . . . is called the “homeland”. The word is thought here in anessential sense, not patriotically or nationalistically, but in terms of the history of being.The essence of homeland, however, is also mentioned with the intention of thinking thehomelessness of contemporary human beings from the essence of being’s history. . . .Homelessness . . . consists in the abandonment of beings by being. Homelessness is thesymptom of the oblivion of being. (p. 258)

chapter 10: heidegger’s transcendental phenomenology

1. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik,text of the 1st and 2nd ed., ed. E. Holenstein, Husserliana, vol. 18 (The Hague:Nijhoff, 1975); and Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 2, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologieund Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer, Husserliana, vol. 19 (Dordrecht: Kluwer,1984); trans. J. N. Findlay, Logical Investigations, 2 vols., rev. ed. with a new introduc-tion by Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001).


2. Husserl,Erste Philosophie (1923–24),Erster Teil:Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. R. Boehm,Husserliana, vol. 7 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965) (hereafter Hua, 7); and Erste Philosophie(1923–24), Zweiter Teil:Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. R. Boehm, Husser-liana, vol. 8 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965). The reference here is to Hua, 7: 3.

3. Hua, 7: 6.4. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 17th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). The

English translation used here is John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being andTime (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

5. The growing tension between Husserl and Heidegger is well documented inThomas Sheehan, “Husserl and Heidegger: The Making and Unmaking of TheirRelationship,” in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontationwith Heidegger (1927–31), by Edmund Husserl, trans.Thomas Sheehan and Richard E.Palmer, in Husserl Collected Works 6 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), pp. 1–32.

6. The drafts of these cooperative attempts at writing the Encyclopaedia Britannicaarticle (1927–28) are translated in Edmund Husserl, Psychological and TranscendentalPhenomenology, pp. 35–196.

7. Heidegger’s self-interpretation here has been challenged in Steven Crowell,Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). I do not intend to discuss this is-sue here, except to agree with Crowell that Heidegger is as occupied with the mean-ing of philosophy as he is with the meaning of being.

8. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänom-enologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed.Walter Biemel, Husser-liana, vol. 6 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962) (hereafter Hua, 6), p. 184; trans. David Carr,The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology:An Introduction to Phe-nomenological Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 180.

9. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephan Strasser,Husserliana, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950) (hereafter Hua, 1), p. 121; trans. DorionCairns, Cartesian Meditations:An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Nijhoff,1967), p. 89.

10. Husserl, Crisis, § 53, pp. 180–81; Hua, 6: 184.11. Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. Petra Jaeger,

Gesamtausgabe, vol. 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994) (hereafter GA, 20);trans. Theodore Kisiel, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: In-diana University Press, 1985).

12. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed.Walter Biemel, Husserliana, vol. 9 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968) (hereafter Hua, 9);trans. J. Scanlon, Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester 1925 (TheHague: Nijhoff, 1977).

13. Heidegger,“Letter to Richardson,” preface to William J. Richardson, Heideg-ger:Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), pp. xiv–xv.

14. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, p. 121; GA, 20: 168.15. Being and Time, pp. 62–63/38.16. Heidegger, “My Way to Phenomenology,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan

Stambaugh, (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 78 (trans. modified).


17. Heidegger, preface to Richardson, Through Phenomenology to Thought, pp. x–xi.18. Heidegger, “For Eugen Fink on His Sixtieth Birthday,” in The Fundamental

Concepts of Metaphysics:World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and NicholasWalker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 367.

19. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959); trans. Peter D.Hertz, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 9.

20. Heidegger,“My Way to Phenomenology,” p. 74.21. Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie:Vorlesungen, 1906/07, ed.

Ullrich Melle, Husserliana, vol. 24 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1985), p. 176.22. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, § 13, p. 124; GA, 20: 172.23. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” trans. William McNeill, in Path-

marks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 108.24. “My Way to Phenomenology,” p. 79.25. Being and Time, p. 251/208.26. Husserl,“Phenomenology and Anthropology,” in Psychological and Transcenden-

tal Phenomenology, p. 486; Aufsätze und Vorträge, 1922–37, ed. T. Nenon H. R. Sepp,Husserliana, vol. 27 (The Hague: Kluwer, 1988) (hereafter Hua, 27), 168.

27. Ibid., p. 490; Hua, 27: 169.28. Ibid., p. 492; Hua, 27: 171.29. Hua, 7: 9.30. See especially, Husserl, Logical Investigations, 1: 310, 2: 3.31. Husserl,“Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” in Edmund Husserl: Phenomenol-

ogy and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row,1964), p. 89.

32. Husserl, “Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy,” trans. Ted E.Klein and William E. Pohl, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 5 (Fall 1974): 26 (trans.modified); Hua, 7: 251.

33. Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsman-uskripten (1918–1926), ed. M. Fleischer, Husserliana, vol. 11 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988),p. 33; trans. Anthony J. Steinbock, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lec-tures on Transcendental Logic, Husserl Collected Works 9 (Dordrecht: Kluwer,2001), p. 71.

34. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, p. 69; GA, 20: 94.35. Ibid., p. 70; GA, 20: 95–96.36. Ibid., p. 71; GA, 20: 97.37. “Bereich der transzendentalen Subjectivität als der Sinn und Sein konstitu-

ierenden”; Cartesian Meditations, § 41, p. 84; Hua, 1: 117.38. Cartesian Meditations, § 41, p. 84; my trans.39. Ibid., § 41, p. 86; Hua, 1: 119; emphasis in original.40. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik:Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Ver-

nunft, ed. Paul Janssen,Husserliana, vol. 17 (The Hague:Nijhoff,1974), p. 280; trans. Do-rion Cairns, Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978), § 104, p. 273.

41. See A. D. Smith, Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (London: Routledge,2003).

42. For a discussion of the nature of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, see Der-mot Moran,“Making Sense: Husserl’s Phenomenology as Transcendental Idealism,”


in From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, ed. Jeff Malpas,Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2003),pp. 48–74.

43. Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, p. 34; Hua, 9: 47.44. Hua, 9: 344.45. See Dan Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity, trans. Elizabeth A.

Behnke (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001); and his Husserl’s Phenomenology(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Natalie Depraz, Transcendance et in-carnation: Le Statut de l’intersubjectivité comme altérité à soi chez Husserl (Paris:Vrin,1995).

46. Hua, 7: 244.47. Husserl, Crisis, pp. 298–99; Hua, 6: 346–47.48. Being and Time § 7, p. 50/28.49. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), § 9, p. 69.50. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, ed. Bernd Heimbüchel, Gesam-

tausgabe, vols. 56–57, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1999), p. 110; “The Idea ofPhilosophy and the Problem of Worldview,” in Towards the Definition of Philosophy,trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 93.

51. Heidegger, “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview,” p. 92.52. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, p. 72; GA, 20: 98.53. Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” trans. James G. Hart and John

C. Maraldo, in Pathmarks, p. 53.54. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, § 3, p. 11.55. Being and Time, p. 487/436.56. Ibid., § 7, p. 49/27.57. Ibid.58. Heidegger, Being and Time, § 69, p. 498n33/363n1.59. Hua, 9: 64. 60. Hua, 9: § 6.61. Hua, 9: 74. 62. Hua, 9: 57.63. Hua, 9: 5. 64. Hua, 9: 58.65. Hua, 9: 61. 66. Hua, 9: 63.67. Hua, 9: 62. 68. Hua, 9: 56.69. Being and Time, 264–65/222.70. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, § 10, p. 101; GA, 20: 139.71. Husserl, Crisis, § 53, p. 179; Hua, 6: 183.72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., p. 175; Hua, 6: 178.74. Ibid., § 52, p. 176; Hua, 6: 179. 75. Ibid.76. Ibid., p. 177; Hua, 6: 181.77. These notes have been edited by Roland Breeur,“Randbemerkungen Husserls

zu Heideggers Sein und Zeit und Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik,” Husserl Studies11 (1994): 3–63; newly edited and translated by Thomas Sheehan, “Husserl’s Mar-ginal Remarks in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,” in Husserl, Psychological andTranscendental Phenomenology, pp. 258–422.

78. Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks,p. 249.


chapter 11: the “i think” and the for-the-sake-of-which

1. See Mark Okrent, “Heidegger and Korsgaard on Human Reflection,” Philo-sophical Topics 27, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 47–76; and “Intending the Intender; or,Why Hei-degger Isn’t Davidson,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Papers Presented inHonor of Hubert Dreyfus, ed. Jeff Malpas and Mark Wrathall (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2000), pp. 279–301.

2. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982), p. 159.

3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:Macmillan, 1968), B131.

4. Ibid.,A320/B376.5. Kant, Lectures on Logic, ed. J. M. Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1992), pp. 569–70.6. Cf. ibid., p. 564. 7. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B130.8. Ibid., B130–31. 9. Ibid.,A117n.10. Ibid., B157. It is interesting that Kant chooses to characterize the “I think” as

a Denken rather than as a concept or a judgment.11. Ibid.,A78/B103.12. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 158.13. Ibid., p. 159.14. Ibid.15. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 159.16. Cf., e.g., Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 292.17. Being and Time, p. 119/86. 18. Ibid., p. 97/68.19. Ibid., pp. 118–19/85–86. 20. Ibid., p. 119/86.21. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 292.22. While there are holistic conditions on a set of behaviors constituting a set of

intentions to employ tools in certain ways, conditions that include the general suit-ability of most of the tools for the purposes to which they are to be put, these con-ditions are “charity” considerations on the system of behavior as a whole, not con-ditions that must be met by any given tool.

23. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 119/86.24. Ibid., pp. 200–201/157–58.25. Ibid., p. 199/156.26. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 208.

chapter 12: heidegger’s “scandal of philosophy”

1. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Meiner, 1976), B39–41:“so bleibt esimmer ein Skandal der Philosophie und allgemeinen Menschenvernunft, das Daseinder Dinge außer uns (von denen wir doch den ganzen Stoff zu Erkenntnissen selbstfür unseren inneren Sinn her haben) bloß auf Glauben annehmen zu müssen, und,wenn es jemand einfällt es zu bezweifeln, ihm keinen genugtuenden Beweis entge-genstellen zu können.”


2. Ibid., B274–79.3. In order to avoid the internal contradiction which this interpretation implies

(see next paragraph in the main text), most present-day interpreters of Kant give adifferent reading of Kant’s notion of a Ding an sich. But I believe that the interpreta-tion in the main text is historically adequate.

4. For instance, Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A494/B522: “Das sinnliche An-schauungsvermögen ist eigentlich nur eine Rezeptivität, auf gewisse Weise mitVorstellungen affiziert zu werden. . . . Die nichtsinnliche Ursache dieser Vorstellun-gen ist uns gänzlich unbekannt, und diese können wir daher nicht als Objekt an-schauen; denn dergleichen Gegenstand würde weder im Raume, noch in der Zeit(als bloßen Bedingungen der sinnlichen Vorrstellung) vorgestellt werden müssen,ohne welche Bedingungen wir uns gar keine Anschauung denken können [Thefaculty of sensible intuition is strictly only a receptivity, a capacity of being affectedin a certain manner with representations. . . . The nonsensible cause of these repre-sentations is completely unknown to us, and cannot therefore be intuited by us asobject. For such an object would have to be represented as neither in space nor intime (these being merely conditions of sensible representation), and apart from suchconditions we cannot think any intuition].”

5. Cf. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Beylage über den transscendentalen Idealis-mus” (1815), in David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus: EinGespräch, in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Werke, ed. Friedrich Roth, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Ger-hard Fleischer d. Jüng, 1812–25), p. 304.

6. Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie (Hamburg: Bohn,1801), pp. 549ff. Cf. also Schulze, Aenesidemus oder über die Fundamente der von demHerrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementar-Philosophie (1792), ed. ManfredFrank (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996), pp. 24, 56–57, 103–4, 127ff., 196–200, and 294–310.

7. Cf. Salomon Maimon, Versuch einer Transscendentalphilosophie (1790) (Darm-stadt:Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), pp. 419ff. References are to the 1790pagination.

8. Eduard von Hartmann, Kritische Grundlegung des Transcendentalen Realismus(Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1875), p. 171:“Die Erkenntnistheorie . . . liefert . . . einerseitsder Metaphysik, andererseits der Naturwissenschaft eine gesicherte Basis, auf derdiese Disciplinen weiterbauen können [The Theory of Knowledge delivers, on theone hand to metaphysics and on the other to natural science, a secure basis onwhich these disciplines can build further]”; von Hartmann, Grundriß der Erkennt-nislehre (Bad Sachsa im Harz: Hermann Haacke, 1907), p. 12:“So verstanden, ist diePhilosophie Erkenntnislehre oder philosophia prima, oder auch Wissenschaftslehre[So understood, Philosophy is theory of knowledge or first philosophy, but also the-ory of science]”; Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Halle a.S.: Niemeyer,1900 and 1901 [= ed. A];Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1913 and 1921 [= ed. B]), B2/1, p.21; Husserl,“Bericht über deutsche Schriften zur Logik in den Jahren 1895–99, Er-ster Artikel,” Archiv für systematische Philosophie 9 (1903): 120; Husserl, Erste Philosophie(1923–24), Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. R. Boehm,Husserliana, vol. 8 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965), pp. xvi–xix.

9. See Herman Philipse,“Transcendental Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companionto Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995), pp. 239–322.


10. G. E. Moore, “A Defence of Common Sense” (1925), in Philosophical Papers(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), pp. 32–59; and “Proof of an ExternalWorld” (1939), in Philosophical Papers, pp. 127–50.

11. Rudolf Carnap, Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie: Das Fremdpsychische und derRealismusstreit (Berlin:Weltkreis, 1928).

12. Carnap,“Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” in Meaning and Necessity, byRudolf Carnap, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 205–29.

13. Carnap, Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin:Weltkreis, 1928), § 64.14. Being and Time, pp. 246–47/202:“Die Frage, ob überhaupt eine Welt sei und ob

deren Sein bewiesen werden könne, ist als Frage, die das Dasein als In-der-Welt-seinstellt—und wer anders sollte sie stellen?—ohne Sinn.” Being and Time trans. modifiedin the quote (“being” not with an initial upper case).

15. Ibid., p. 249/205: “Der ‘Skandal der Philosophie’ besteht nicht darin, daßdieser Beweis bislang noch aussteht, sondern darin, daß solche Beweise immer wieder er-wartet und versucht werden” (Heidegger’s italics; Being and Time trans. modified).

16. Ibid., pp. 245–46/201: “Unter dem Titel ‘Realitätsproblem’ vermengen sichverschiedene Fragen: 1. ob das vermeintlich ‘bewußtseinstranszendente’ Seiendeüberhaupt sei; 2. ob diese Realität der ‘Außenwelt’ zureichend bewiesen werdenkönne; 3. inwieweit dieses Seiende, wenn es real ist, in seinem An-sich-sein zuerkennen sei; 4. was der Sinn dieses Seienden, Realität, überhaupt bedeute” (Hei-degger’s italics; Being and Time trans. modified).

17. Ibid., p. 247/202: “Überdies bleibt sie mit einer Doppeldeutigkeit behaftet.Welt als das Worin des In-Seins und ‘Welt’ als innerweltliches Seiendes.”

18. Ibid., p. 246/202: “In der Ordnung der aufgezählten Fragen nach der Real-ität ist die ontologische, was Realität überhaupt bedeute, die erste.”

19. Ibid.:“Die Möglichkeit der zureichenden ontologischen Analyse der Realitäthängt daran, wie weit das, wovon Unabhängigkeit bestehen soll, was transzendiertwerden soll, selbst hinsichtlich seines Seins geklärt ist.”

20. Ibid., p. 27/7:“Dieses Seiende, das wir selbst je sind . . . fassen wir terminol-ogisch als Dasein.”

21. Cf. Sein und Zeit, §§ 5–6.22. Ibid., p. 36/15: “Das Dasein hat vielmehr gemäß einer zu ihm gehörigen

Seinsart die Tendenz, das eigene Sein aus dem Seienden her zu verstehen, zu dem essich wesenhaft ständig und zunächst verhält, aus der ‘Welt’” (Heidegger’s italics).

23. Cf. ibid.:“Das Dasein ist zwar ontisch nicht nur nahe oder gar das nächste—wir sind es sogar je selbst. Trotzdem oder gerade deshalb ist es ontologisch das Fern-ste” (Heidegger’s italics).

24. See note 14.25. Being and Time, p. 250/206:“Das ‘Realitätsproblem’ im Sinne der Frage, ob eine

Außenwelt vorhanden und ob sie beweisbar sei, erweist sich als ein unmögliches, nichtweil es in der Konsequenz zu unaustragbaren Aporien führt, sondern weil das Seiendeselbst, das in diesem Problem im Thema steht, eine solche Fragestellung gleichsamablehnt” (trans. modified).

26. Cf. ibid., p. 252/208: “Die Diskussion der unausgesprochenen Voraussetzun-gen der nur ‘erkenntnistheoretischen’ Lösungsversuche des Realitätsproblems zeigt,daß es in die existenziale Analytik des Daseins als ontologisches Problem zurück-genommen werden muß.”


27. Cf. ibid., p. 247/203:“Allerdings kann gerade das innerweltliche Seiende imSinne des Realen, nur Vorhandenen noch verdeckt bleiben. Entdeckbar jedoch istauch Reales nur auf dem Grunde einer schon erschlossenen Welt. Und nur aufdiesem Grunde kann Reales auch verborgen bleiben.”

28. Ibid., p. 93/65:“das,‘worin’ ein faktisches Dasein als dieses ‘lebt’” (Heidegger’sitalics).

29. Heidegger is less explicit than Wittgenstein, in On Certainty, about the factthat such a global framework presupposes the existence of many entities, so that itdoes not make sense to doubt the existence of these entities either. I assume, how-ever, that Heidegger would agree with Wittgenstein on this point.

30. Cf. ibid., § 3, p. 29/9:“Das All des Seienden kann nach seinen verschiedenenBezirken zum Feld einer Freilegung und Umgrenzung bestimmter Sachgebiete wer-den. Diese ihrerseits, z. B. Geschichte, Natur, Raum, Leben, Dasein, Sprache und dgl.lassen sich in entsprechenden wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen zu Gegenständenthematisieren.”

31. Ibid., p. 54/31.32. It is no accident that Heidegger consistently speaks of “Dasein im Men-

schen” in his first book on Kant, of 1929, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (4thed., Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973).

33. Ibid., Being and Time, p. 62/37:“Bedingungen der Möglichkeit jeder ontolo-gischen Untersuchung” (trans. modified).

34. See Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), §§ 6–9 and 13, for a developmentof this interpretation.

35. Cf. ibid., pp. 122–23, for the structure and details of Heidegger’s transcen-dental arguments. Cf. also Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being,and the Critique of Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988);WilliamBlattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

36. David R. Cerbone,“World,World-Entry, and Realism in Early Heidegger,”Inquiry 38 (1995): 401.

37. Ibid., p. 272/230: “Sein—nicht Seiendes—‘gibt es’ nur, sofern Wahrheit ist.Und sie ist nur sofern und solange Dasein ist” (Heidegger’s italics).

38. Ibid., p. 228/183:“Seiendes ist unabhängig von Erfahrung, Kenntnis und Er-fassen, wodurch es erschlossen, entdeckt und bestimmt wird. Sein aber ‘ist’ nur imVerstehen des Seienden, zu dessen Sein so etwas wie Seinsverständnis gehört” (Hei-degger’s italics). Of course, the genitive des Seienden is a genitivus subjectivus and refersto Dasein.

39. Of course, Heidegger uses idealism in a particular sense. Cf. ibid., p. 251/208:“Besagt der Titel Idealismus soviel wie Verständnis dessen, daß Sein nie durch Seien-des erklärbar, sondern für jedes Seiende je schon das ‘Transzendentale’ ist, dann liegtim Idealismus die einzige und rechte Möglichkeit philosophischer Problematik.”

40. Ibid., pp. 25–26/6: “das Sein, das, was Seiendes als Seiendes bestimmt, das,woraufhin Seiendes, mag es wie immer erörtert werden, je schon verstanden ist”(trans. modified).

41. Husserl denies the possibility of a Ding an sich in the traditional sense but he alsoredefines the very notion of a Ding an sich. Cf. Philipse,“Transcendental Idealism.”


42. Being and Time, p. 250/206: “Zu beweisen ist nicht, daß und wie eine‘Außenwelt’ vorhanden ist, sondern aufzuweisen ist, warum das Dasein als In-der-Welt-sein die Tendenz hat, die ‘Außenwelt’ zunächst ‘erkenntnistheoretisch’ inNichtigkeit zu begraben, um sie dann erst zu beweisen. Der Grund dafür liegt imVerfallen des Daseins und der darin motivierten Verlegung des primären Seinsver-ständnisses auf das Sein als Vorhandenheit” (trans. modified).

43. Cf. ibid., p. 254/211: “alle Seinsmodi des innerweltlichen Seienden sind on-tologisch in der Weltlichkeit der Welt und damit im Phänomen des In-der-Welt-seins fundiert” (Heidegger’s italics).

44. Ibid., p. 100/70: “die Natur als das, was ‘webt und strebt’, uns überfällt, alsLandschaft gefangen nimmt.” Cf. ibid., p. 254/211:“Die ‘Natur’, die uns ‘umf ängt’,ist zwar innerweltliches Seiendes, zeigt aber weder die Seinsart des Zuhandenennoch des Vorhandenen in der Weise der ‘Naturdinglichkeit.’”

45. Ibid., p. 101/71: “Zuhandenheit ist die ontologisch-kategoriale Bestimmung vonSeiendem, wie es ‘an sich’ ist” (Heidegger’s italics, trans. modified); cf. Being and Time,pp. 103–6, 120–21, 140–41/74, 75–76, 87, 106.

46. Being and Time, p. 255/212: “Allerdings nur solange Dasein ist, das heißt dieontische Möglichkeit von Seinsverständnis, ‘gibt es’ Sein. Wenn Dasein nicht ex-istiert, dann ‘ist’ auch nicht ‘Unabhängigkeit’ und ‘ist’ auch nicht ‘An-sich’. Der-gleichen ist dann weder verstehbar noch unverstehbar. Dann ist auch inner-weltliches Seiendes weder entdeckbar, noch kann es in Verborgenheit liegen. Dannkann weder gesagt werden, daß Seiendes sei, noch daß es nicht sei. Es kann jetztwohl, solange Seinsverständnis ist und damit Verständnis von Vorhandenheit, gesagtwerden, daß dann Seiendes noch weiterhin sein wird” (Heidegger’s italics, trans.modified).

47. Cerbone,“World,World-Entry, and Realism,” p. 402.48. Dorothea Frede,“Heidegger and the Scandal of Philosophy,” in Human Na-

ture and Natural Knowledge, ed. A. Donagan, A. N. Perovich, and M. V. Wedin(Dordecht: Reidel, 1986), p. 141.

49. Ibid., p. 143:“since the things’ occurrence, as we understand occurrence, doesnot depend on our noticing or using them.”

50. Ibid., p. 142.51. Ibid.52. Frederick Olafson, Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind (New Haven, CT:Yale

University Press, 1987), p. xvii.53. Blattner, “Is Heidegger a Kantian Idealist?” in Inquiry 37 (1994): 188–89. Cf.

Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, pp. 142–44.54. Being and Time, p. 101/71:“sie darf jedoch nicht als bloßer Auffassungscharak-

ter verstanden werden, als würden dem zunächst begegnenden ‘Seienden’ solche‘Aspekte’ aufgeredet, als würde ein zunächst an sich vorhandener Weltstoff in dieserWeise ‘subjektiv gefärbt.’” Heidegger argues here against Husserl, Rickert, NicolaïHartmann, and others.

55. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philoso-phie, Husserliana, vol. 3 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976), § 51,“Anmerkung.” Cf. Philipse,“Transcendental Idealism.”

56. Cf. Philipse, “Transcendental Idealism,” for a defence of this interpretation.


57. Being and Time, p. 246/202: “Aller Zugang zu solchem Seienden ist ontolo-gisch fundiert in der Grundverfassung des Daseins, dem In-der-Welt-sein” (trans.modified).

58. Ibid., pp. 251–52/208:“Bedeutet Idealismus die Rückführung alles Seiendenauf ein Subjekt oder Bewußtsein, die sich nur dadurch auszeichnen, daß sie inihrem Sein unbestimmt bleiben und höchstens negativ als ‘undinglich’ charakterisiertwerden, dann ist dieser Idealismus methodisch nicht weniger naiv als der grob-schlächtigste Realismus” (Heidegger’s italics). I read this passage as giving two rea-sons for rejecting traditional transcendental idealism.

59. Remember, however, that this is only one of the two leitmotifs in the ques-tion of being in Being and Time.

60. Being and Time, p. 204/161:“Den Bedeutungen wachsen Worte zu.” Cf. ibid.,§ 18.

61. Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and “Being and Time” (London: Routledge, 1996),p. 98. His example is a table. Cf. Frede,“Heidegger and the Scandal of Philosophy”;Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World:A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Di-vision I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 257; Cerbone, “World,World-Entry,and Realism”; and Theodore R. Schatzki,“Early Heidegger on Being, the Clearing,and Realism,” in Heidegger:A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Hall(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 93; Blattner,“Is Heidegger a Kantian Idealist?”

62. Being and Time, p. 254/211: “Realität ist als ontologischer Titel auf inner-weltliches Seiendes bezogen. Dient er zur Bezeichnung dieser Seinsart überhaupt,dann fungieren Zuhandenheit und Vorhandenheit als Modi der Realität. Läßt manaber diesem Wort seine überlieferte Bedeutung, dann meint es das Sein im Sinneder puren Dingvorhandenheit.”

63. Cf. Mulhall, Heidegger and “Being and Time,” p. 98:“Dasein encounters mater-ial things as phenomena which exist independently of its encounters with them.Part of what we mean when we claim to see a table in the room is that we are see-ing something which was there before we entered the room and which will con-tinue to be there after we leave.” Cf. also Blattner,“Is Heidegger a Kantian Idealist?”note 3.

64. Being and Time, p. 252/209:“Wenn der Titel Realität das Sein des innerweltlichvorhandenen Seienden (res) meint—und nichts anderes wird darunter verstanden.”

65. Ibid., p. 246/202:“sofern zu Realität der Charakter des An-sich und der Un-abhängigkeit gehört.”

66. Ibid., p. 255/212:“Es kann jetzt wohl, solange Seinsverständnis ist und damitVerständnis von Vorhandenheit, gesagt werden, daß dann Seiendes noch weiterhinsein wird” (trans. modified).

67. In my Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, pp. 432–433n258, I stressed the differ-ence between these two passages.

68. Blattner,“Is Heidegger a Kantian Idealist?” p. 186.69. Ibid., p. 195, objection (D). In Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, this is ob-

jection (C), on p. 248.70. Blattner,“Is Heidegger a Kantian Idealist?” p. 195; Blattner, Heidegger’s Tempo-

ral Idealism, pp. 248–49.


71. Blattner,“Is Heidegger a Kantian Idealist?” p. 195; Blattner, Heidegger’s Tempo-ral Idealism, p. 249.

72. This is not exactly what Blattner says in “Is Heidegger a Kantian Idealist?” p.196. What he says is:“As with Kant’s transcendental standpoint in sense (2), we canonly say something negative from within it, in this case, that being ‘is’ not.” But thatwas not at all what one attempted to say from standpoint (2). The discovery that“being” depends upon Dasein rather belongs to transcendental standpoint (1).

73. Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, pp. 303–5 and 326–27.74. It shipwrecks, for instance, also McDowell’s attempt in Mind and World. See

Philipse,“Should We Be Kantians?” in Ratio:An International Journal of Analytic Phi-losophy 13 (2000): 239–55; and 14 (2001): 33–55.

75. Cerbone,“World,World-Entry, and Realism,” pp. 416, and §§ 3–4 as a whole;and Schatzki,“Early Heidegger on Being,” pp. 95–96.

76. Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).77. Being and Time, p. 414/362:“es gibt grundsätzlich keine ‘bloßen Tatsachen’”;

“Erst ‘im Licht’ einer dergestalt entworfenen Natur kann so etwas wie eine ‘Tat-sache’ gefunden und für einen aus dem Entwurf regulativ umgrenzten Versuchangesetzt werden” (trans. modified).

78. What Is a Thing? (Die Frage nach dem Ding?) (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967),p. 10: “We want to participate in the preparation of a decision: Is science the mea-sure of knowledge, or is there a knowledge in which the ground and limit of sci-ence and thus its genuine effectiveness are determined?”

79. Ibid., p. 38:“was uns am meisten gefangen hält und in der Erfahrung und Bes-timmung der Dinge unfrei macht. Es ist die neuzeitliche Naturwissenschaft, sofernsie nach gewissen Grundzügen zu einer allgemeinen Denkform geworden ist.”

80. Being and Time, p. 128/95: “daß Descartes nicht etwa nur eine ontologischeFehlbestimmung der Welt gibt, sondern daß seine Interpretation und deren Funda-mente dazu führten, das Phänomen der Welt sowohl wie das Sein des zunächstzuhandenen innerweltlichen Seienden zu überspringen” (Heidegger’s italics). Cf. Be-ing and Time, p. 93/65:“A glance at previous ontology shows that if one fails to seebeing-in-the-world as a state of dasein, the phenomenon of worldhood likewisegets passed over” (Heidegger’s italics). Cf. also Being and Time, pp. 133–34/100.

81. See Being and Time, p. 412/360–61: “das vorliegende Seiende, das wir um-sichtig schon als Hammer kennen, hat ein Gewicht, das heißt die ‘Eigenschaft’ derSchwere. . . . Das nunmehr Gesichtete eignet nicht dem Hammer als Werkzeug,sondern als Körperding, das dem Gesetz der Schwere unterliegt.”

82. See note 42.83. See for a description of the papers Heidegger published as a young student

of theology in Der Akademiker, Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Bi-ographie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1988), pp. 62–66.

84. Unless one is an orthodox follower of Thomas Kuhn.85. Being and Time, p. 122/88: “daß auf dem Grunde von Weltlichkeit der Welt

dieses Seiende in seinem ‘substanziellen’‘An-sich’ allererst entdeckbar ist”; and ibid.,p. 117/85: “Dieses ‘apriorische’ Bewendenlassen ist die Bedingung der Möglichkeitdafür, daß Zuhandenes begegnet.”


86. Ibid., p. 101/71: “Aber Zuhandenes ‘gibt es’ doch nur auf dem Grunde vonVorhandenem. Folgt aber—diese These einmal zugestanden—hieraus, daß Zuhan-denheit ontologisch in Vorhandenheit fundiert ist?” (trans. modified).

87. Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1984), p. 195: “World-entry and its occurrence is the presuppositionnot for extant things to become first extant and enter into that which manifests itselfto us as its extantness and which we understand as such. Rather world-entry and itsoccurrence is solely the presupposition for extant things announcing themselves intheir not requiring world-entry regarding their own being.”This text is also dis-cussed by Cerbone, in “World,World-Entry, and Realism.”

88. Another passage is Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, p. 156, where Heideggersays that the factical existence of Dasein “presupposes the factical extantness of na-ture[faktische Vorhandensein].” Cf. Steven Crowell, “Metaphysics, Metontology, andthe End of Being and Time,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (2000): 321,for a discussion of this passage.

89. Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, p. 250, referring to Being and Time,p. 255/212.

90. See note 46.91. See Joseph P. Fell,“The Familiar and the Strange: On the Limits of Praxis in

Early Heidegger,” in Heidegger:A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and HarrisonHall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 65–80.

92. Being and Time, p. 232/187: “In der Angst versinkt das umweltlich Zuhan-dene, überhaupt das innerweltlich Seiende.”

93. Ibid., p. 231/186: “Nichts von dem, was innerhalb der Welt zuhanden undvorhanden ist, fungiert als das, wovor die Angst sich ängstet. Die innerweltlich ent-deckte Bewandtnisganzheit des Zuhandenen und Vorhandenen ist als solche über-haupt ohne Belang. Sie sinkt in sich zusammen.”

94. Ibid., p. 232/187: “Das Sichängsten erschließt ürsprünglich und direkt dieWelt als Welt.”

95. Cf. “What Is Metaphysics?” (Was ist Metaphysik?), in Pathmarks, ed. WilliamMcNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 33: “Das Seiende wirddoch durch die Angst nicht vernichtet, um so das Nichts übrig zu lassen”; and p. 90:“Nihilation . . . manifests . . . beings in their full but heretofore concealed strange-ness as what is radically.”

96. I do not agree, then, with the interpretation of Hubert Dreyfus and CharlesSpinosa in “Coping with Things-in-Themselves:A Practice-Based Phenomenolog-ical Argument for Realism,” Inquiry 42 (1999), on what Heidegger says on Angst:“What the phenomenon of strangeness revealed in total breakdown supports is thesparer claim that we can make sense of nature as independent of our coping prac-tices” (p. 55). What Heidegger says is that in Angst we cannot make sense of entitiesat all.

97. Was ist Metaphysik? p. 34; Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David FarrellKrell, rev. and exp. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 103: “In der hellenNacht des Nichts der Angst ersteht erst die ursprüngliche Offenheit des Seiendenals einen solchen: daß es Seiendes ist—und nicht Nichts” (trans. modified).


98. Was ist Metaphysik? p. 32; Basic Writings, p. 101:“Die Angst verschlägt uns dasWort. Weil das Seiende im Ganzen entgleitet und so gerade das Nichts andrängt,schweigt im Angesicht seiner jedes ‘Ist’-Sagen.”

99. See note 38.100. Fell,“The Familiar and the Strange,” p. 70.101. Dreyfus and Spinosa,“Coping with Things-in-Themselves,” p. 50.102. Ibid., p. 56.103. It seems that Heidegger in his lectures Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

(Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik), of 1928, wanted to develop an ontology ofnature (“metontology”) which spells out transcendental realism. Crowell, in “Meta-physics, Metontology,” argues correctly that this type of transcendental realismwould be incompatible with the transcendental philosophy of Being and Time: “Tosuggest that Dasein’s understanding of being presupposes the factical extantness ofnature thus implies a shift toward a transcendental realistic perspective which is notjust supplemental to, but inconsistent with, the phenomenological project” (p. 325).Crowell indeed thinks that “Being and Time is finally inconsistent on the issue” (ibid.,note 44).

104. See Being and Time, p. 251/207:“Mit dem Dasein als In-der-Welt-sein ist in-nerweltliches Seiendes je schon erschlossen. Diese existenzial-ontologische Aussagescheint mit der These des Realismus übereinzukommen, daß die Außenwelt realvorhanden sei,” and so on. (trans. modified).

105. In fact, zuhanden is an archaism, and meant in one’s hands or near to one’shands. In Swiss German, zuhanden is used as zu Händen in German. Es ist mir zuhan-den gekommen means the same as Es ist mir in die Hände gekommen in German (I ac-quired it accidentally). Zuhanden also means being near, easily accessible, ready to begrasped.

106. See Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik:Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit, Gesamtaus-gabe, vols. 29–30 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), pp. 398–400; and Fell,“The Familiar and the Strange,” p. 71.

107. Cf. Fell,“The Familiar and the Strange,” p. 71.108. Being and Time, p. 254/211:“Aber nicht jede Vorhandenheit ist Dingvorhan-

denheit. Die ‘Natur’, die uns ‘umf ängt’, ist zwar innerweltliches Seiendes, zeigt aberweder die Seinsart des Zuhandenen noch des Vorhandenen in der Weise der ‘Natur-dinglichkeit’” (trans. modified).

109. Ibid., p. 412–13/361: “Aber konstituiert sich dadurch, daß wir, statt Zuhan-denes umsichtig zu überlegen, es als Vorhandenes ‘auffassen’, schon ein wis-senschaftliches Verhalten?” (trans. modified).

110. An example of the latter approach is P. M. S. Hacker, Appearance and Real-ity:A Philosophical Investigation into Perception and Perceptual Qualities (Oxford: Black-well, 1987).

chapter 13: heidegger on failed meaning

1. In fact, Hitchcock came to realize the mystery, intensity, and tension of a nar-rative greatly increased if such a presence could also remain an absence.


2. François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 139.3. “Das Sein—Ein MacGuffin,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 27, 1987, p. 35.4. Being and Time, p. 331/285.5. Rudolf Carnap,“The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of

Language,” in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 60–81.6. I realize that I am here taking a side in a dispute with many facets. But Hei-

degger seems to me pretty consistent about this, and critics like Tugendhat are off-base when they charge Heidegger with equivocating between asking about themeaning of being and asking about the meaning of the word, being. However, Ineed to charge ahead if I am to get to the issue of interest. See Ernst Tugendhat,Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1986), pp. 147–48. The most comprehensive and convincing refutation of Tu-gendhat’s overall interpretation is in Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also chapter 5 of Stanley Rosen,The Question of Being:A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press,1993), pp. 176–211.

7. Being and Time, p. 31/11.8. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1 (Pfüllingen: Neske, 1961), p. 26.9. That any such meaning must be a “temporal” meaning is an answer to such a

possibility question not to a question about being itself. Indeed, as we shall see, Hei-degger’s main thesis is that there cannot be such a latter answer and that is why theanswer to the first question is as it is.

10. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and RichardPolt (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2000), p. 19.

11. Now immediately we have to state such claims carefully. Heidegger is clearthat he considers the great initiating moment of post-Platonic Greek metaphysics—the resolution that “to be” was “to be intelligible,” to be determinate (delimited bydeterminate form)—to be in fact a hybristic “resolve,” the beginning of Westernmetaphysics as the imposition of subjective requirements for intelligibility, and so anorientation that obscured to the point of forgetting the “being process” itself, the“happening” or eventually historical character of the meaning of being, and so theintertwined relation between being and nothing, between meaning and darkness,nonmeaning. But it is clear that it is meaningfulness itself that is at issue in Heideg-ger’s project, what could be object of any understanding, what could somehowmark the basic difference between “meaningfully being” at all, and absent, or what Iwant to discuss later as failed, meaning.

12. Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelmvon Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 24 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975),p. 460.

13. Nietzsche, 2: 415. 14. Being and Time, p. 33/13.15. Ibid., p. 62/37. 16. Ibid., p. 121/87.17. Ibid., p. 193/151. 18. Ibid., p. 255/212.19. Ibid., p. 270/227. 20. Ibid., p. 255/212.21. Ibid.22. Ibid., p. 261/218. The same point is made if, following Dahlstrom and in a

different way, Haugeland (see below, note 25), we note the limited, ontic frame for


“uncoveredness” in the above passage and note that by the time of Being and Time,the fundamental happening of truth occurs as “disclosedness” (Erschlossenheit). Dahl-strom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, pp. 389–90.

23. This is the sense in which Robert Brandom argues that, say, the only grip thenotion of a particular might have for us consists in our understanding the role ofsingular terms in language. Cf. “Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” inTales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 194ff.

24. I think that Taylor Carmen is right about this in Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpre-tation, Discourse and Authenticity in “Being and Time” (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2003).

25. John Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existen-tialism,” in Heidegger,Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert Dreyfus, ed.Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 57. Forreasons that will soon become apparent, I don’t agree with Haugeland that some-thing like the basic laws of physics, constituting what is to count as a physical ob-ject, could be an example of Heideggerian disclosedness. For an influential treat-ment of Heidegger as “still transcendental,” in a way continuous with Husserl, seeErnst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: de Gruyter,1967).

26. This is the sort of question that emerges for any transcendental account thattries to isolate “that without which” some undeniable feature of our experience orlanguage, like the difference between the succession of representations and the rep-resentation or succession, or the possible re-identifiability of particulars, would beimpossible. Even in Strawson’s “austere” version of the Kantian project, as delimitingthe bounds of sense, the question of the status of his results and so the problem of“verificationism,” was raised immediately; especially by Barry Stroud,“Transcenden-tal Arguments,” in The First Critique, ed. T. Penelhum and J. MacIntosh (Belmont,CA:Wadsworth, 1969), pp. 54–69; and Richard Rorty, “Strawson’s Objectivity Ar-gument,” Review of Metaphysics, 24 (1970): 207–44.

27. See the very helpful account in Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Car-nap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000). See also chapter 1 ofTheodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Bring and Time” (Berkeley and Los An-geles: University of California Press, 1993); Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’sKantian Turn: Notes to His Commentary of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” Review ofMetaphysics 45, no. 2 (December 1991): 329–61; and Steven Crowell,“Lask, Heideg-ger, and the Homelessness of Logic,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology23, no. 3 (October 1991): 222–39.

28. Cf. Being and Time:“But subject and object do not coincide with Dasein andthe world” (p. 87/60).Without Dasein, there can be entities but no “meaning of be-ing” question. Speculating about the meaning of being “in itself ” is like speculatingabout what objects could be said to be like, were we to abstract from any way inwhich we could know such objects.

29. This issue leads into complicated territory. Heidegger insists that, just as amode of presence for some meaning can be its hiddenness, living in the forgetful-ness of the meaning of being is still ontologically distinctive, the question is still present


by virtue of its absence. Much more would have to be said about this to counterthe impression that Heidegger is stacking the deck against objections to his claimthat Dasein “is” ontological. But it remains a problem for any “transcendental ac-count.” See Haugeland in “Truth and Finitude,” p. 47, where one must cite bothHeidegger’s claim that the question of being has been forgotten (no disclosure goeson), and that such disclosure is a “condition of the possibility of any comportmenttowards entities as entities” (my emphasis). There are similar paradoxes elsewhere.Haugeland wants to treat Heideggerian fallenness as analogous to what Kuhn callsnormality in science. But, for Kuhn, this tenacious hold of normality is, as Hauge-land notes, a good thing. It requires a persistent attempt to solve problems, not giveup on them. But we are “lost” in the “they,” not merely going on as they do.Haugeland himself notes on the next page that as publicness functions in Heideg-ger it has a “tendency to disguise and forget anxiety,” the disclosive state that can callus back to ourselves. All such paradoxes stem from the unusual sort of “failure” Hei-degger wants to account for.

30. If there really is such an inseparability then we can only quite artificially iso-late condition and conditioned. Each “side” is so determined in respect to the other(“meaning” and “that without which meaning is impossible”) that we are smack inthe middle of Heidegger’s circle, not the realm of transcendental necessity. Thus,when Heidegger invokes transcendental terminology, there is usually some qualifi-cation. At Being and Time, p. 65/41, “a priori” gets scare quotes; when, at p. 78/53,he says freely that being-in-the-world is a “necessary a priori constituent [Verfassung]of Dasein,” he tosses it off as if it were a mere preliminary observation and “not by alarge measure sufficient” to fully determine the being of Dasein.

31. Compare this telling remark from the 1929–30 Fundamental Concepts of Meta-physics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 1–2:

What if it were a prejudice that metaphysics is a fixed and secure discipline, and an illu-sion that philosophy is a science that can be taught and learned? . . . Is all this talk ofphilosophy being the absolute science a delusion? Not just because the individual orsome school never achieves this end, but because positing the end is itself fundamentallyan error and a misunderstanding of the innermost essence of philosophy. Philosophy asabsolute science—a lofty, unsurpassable ideal. So it seems. And yet perhaps even judgingphilosophy according to the idea of science is the most disastrous debasement of its inner-most essence.

Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik:Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit, ed. Otto Saame and InaSaame-Speidel, Gesamtausgabe, vols. 29–30 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983), p. 2.

32. Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, ed. Claudius Strube, Gesam-tausgabe, vol. 59 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), p. 91. Quoted by Dahl-strom, “Heidegger’s Kantian Turn,” p. 385. Note his qualification in the footnote.

33. “Way of life”: to invoke Haugeland’s comprehensive term of art for Daseinin his “Dasein’s Disclosedness,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert Dreyfusand Harrison Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 35.

34. In this, Heidegger is closer than he knows to the Kantian and post-Kantiantradition, once one breaks free from Heidegger’s Cartesian interpretation. Begin-


ning especially with Kant’s moral philosophy,“person,” despite the surface grammar,is in no sense a substantive or metaphysical category but in some way or other apractical achievement, and the attribution of the notion to an other is an ascriptionnot a description. As Fichte would say, the I posits itself; as Hegel would say, Geist isa “result of itself.”The somewhat confusing but very important point here is thatbeing a subject means being able to fail to be one, something that already tells us alot about the uniquely practical, not metaphysical, status of subjectivity in the post-Kantian tradition. See my “Naturalness and Mindedness: Hegel’s Compatibilism,”European Journal of Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999): 194–212; and “Fichte’s Alleged One-Sided, Subjective, Psychological Idealism,” in The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philoso-phy: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, ed. Sally Sedgwick (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2000).

35. Being and Time, p. 33/12.36. Ibid. p. 59/35.37. Ibid., p. 152/116.38. Ibid., p. 97/68; p. 109/78; pp. 117–20/85–87.39. Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and

Time,” Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 68.40. Being and Time, p. 231/186.41. Ibid., p. 310/265–66.42. Ibid., p. 331/285.43. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysick, pp. 244 and 248. These lectures are filled

with references to the economic and social global crisis of 1929, and make clearerhow Heidegger understood the political implications of his account of the meaningof being. They thus give a chilling sense of the kind of desperation that can be pro-duced if one believes oneself to be in such a situation. See Gregory Fried’s interest-ing study, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven, CT:Yale UniversityPress, 2000).

44. Being and Time, p. 330/284.45. Ibid., p. 332/286. The radicality and extreme difficulty of the claim that the

primordial meaning of Dasein’s being is disclosed in the collapse of meaning, insuch a primordial meaning just being the possibility of collapse or failure of mean-ing, are related to what Heidegger says about the nature of our not-being, the ne-cessity and impossibility of its incorporabilty into the structure of care. In effectHeidegger is trying to resurrect an Eleatic, or radical, sense of not-being, to medemoson, not just to me on. That is, he is trying to recover what he considers obscured bythe “solution” to the problem proposed in Plato’s Sophist. Since the sophist sayswhat is not, it might look to an Eleatic that he violates the proscription on nonbe-ing, and so there cannot really be a sophist, or a distinction between sophist andphilosopher, because nonbeing cannot be. But Plato’s Eleatic stranger tries to showthat to me on cannot be some sort of radically empty being, just a not-being, but isinstead “otherness,” a kind of otherness “woven through” all the beings. To say whatis not the case is not then to say what is not, but to say what is other than the truthat the time; that is, always to say something else, to say of something other than whatis the case that it is the case. In Heidegger’s 1924–25 Marburg course on Plato’sSophist this issue is brought to a head in §§ 78 and 79. See Plato’s Sophist, trans.


Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1997), pp. 386–401. But Heidegger is so self-restricted there in his role as a com-mentator that the issue is much easier to see elsewhere in his lectures, when hespeaks more in his own voice.

46. Cf. also another such attempt, Hegel’s—especially, in his introduction to thePhenomenology of Spirit, his remark that “in every case the result of an untrue modeof knowledge must not be allowed to run away into an empty nothing, but mustnecessarily be grasped as the nothing of that from which it results [Nichts, desjenigen,dessen Resultat es ist].” G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 56.

47. This is the passage from Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” as quoted byCarnap, with ellipses, in “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” p. 69.

48. Being and Time, p. 251/245. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 56; Die Phänome-nologie des Geistes, in Hauptwerke in sechs Bänden, vol. 2 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1999), p. 61.

49. He wants to make the same point about the implications of the primordialsituation of thrownness, about what happens to us, by coining such neologisms as“Die Angst ängstet sich um das Seinkönnen des so bestimmten Seiende [Anxiety isanxious about the potentiality-for-being of the entity so destined]” (Being and Time,p. 310/266).

50. Heidegger’s example in Introduction to Metaphysics is from Knut Hamsun’s TheRoad Leads On, where a poet sitting alone by the ocean, muses, “Here—nothingmeets nothing and is not there, there is not even a hole. One can only shake one’shead in resignation.” Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 29.

51. Being and Time, p. 435/384. Cf. the remark in Introduction to Metaphysics:“Thehuman being has no way out, in the face of death, not only when it is time to die,but constantly and essentially. Insofar as humans are, they stand in the no-exit ofdeath. Thus being-there is the happening of the uncanniness itself ” (p. 169). Itwould take several more chapters to try to show that this sort of account of mean-ing-failure is paradigmatic for what Heidegger wants to say in all contexts about themeaning of being. But I would want to argue that there are always parallels to thissort of account in those other contexts. Forms of life can also “fail” to mean, andthere can be analogous anticipations of death in phenomena like “nihilism.” Thelanguage of Being and Time is reconfigured as a kind of struggle between “Earth”(thrownness) and “World” (projection), in On the Origin of the Work of Art, and soforth.

52. It is certainly possible to characterize Heidegger’s account as “transcenden-tal” in a rather benign sense. One could say that Heidegger has shown that a neces-sary condition of Dasein’s being making sense is the possibility of its not makingsense; only such a condition can disclose this unavoidable “condition”: the uttercontingency of such care or mattering or significance when it happens. Or onecould say, with Føllesdall, that Heidegger has shown that purposive action is a “nec-essary constituent” of the possibility of intentionality. But this is too benign to bevery informative, and could be misleading. Heidegger’s procedure is rather to estab-lish a question, demonstrate both its supremely distinct and practically unavoidablecharacter, and then argue that various possible candidate accounts (like Cartesianmentalism) fail to answer it. He does not, cannot, argue, say, that nonpractical inten-


tionality is “impossible.” See Dagfinn Føllesdall, “Husserl and Heidegger on theRole of Actions in the Constitution of the World,” in Essays in Honor of Jaakko Hin-tikka, ed. E. Saarinen, R. Hilpinen, I. Niiniluoto, and M. P. Hintikka (Dordrecht:Riedel, 1979).

53. Or: when Kafka’s K cannot find the Court that has accused him, or even thecharge against him, we are not to assume that if he tried harder or got lucky hemight have. In a paradoxical way that exactly mirrors Heidegger’s claim: this failurein no way lessens the bewildering guilt K begins to feel, the anxious sense that be-ing alive itself is the situation of being guilty. In the parable of the law and the manfrom the country that closes the novel, there are three things true of the elements ofthe fable. The doorway to the law is for the man from the country; he may not,however, enter; and these two facts do not amount to a contradiction but instead “anecessity.”

54. Being and Time, p. 374/326.55. Ibid., p. 381/332.56. Ibid., p. 427/375.57. Preserving that connection also makes the relation between the so-called

early and later Heidegger considerably easier to see for English readers, the Heideg-ger who will say very shortly after Being and Time (in a 1931–32 lecture course),“Be-ing happens as a history of human beings, as the history of a Volk.” Vom Wesen derWahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet, ed. Hermann Mörchen, Gesamtaus-gabe, vol. 34 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988), p. 145. Stambaugh’s word forGeschehen in her later translation of Sein und Zeit,“occurrence,” is better, but it nowconflicts with what has emerged as the preferred translations of vorhanden andzuhanden, John Haugeland’s “occurent” and “available.” Being and Time, trans. JoanStambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

58. Being and Time, p. 435/384.59. Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 19; Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 27.60. Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 51; Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 57.61. See chapter 7, “Unending Modernity,” in my Modernism as a Philosophical

Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell,1999), pp. 160ff.

chapter 14: projection and purposiveness

I owe thanks to the participants in the 2003 conference Heidegger’s Transcendental-ism, held at Rice University in Houston, especially Steven Crowell, and to JosephRouse and Catherine Zuckert for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

1. Namely, Heidegger’s Kant interpretation in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics(trans. Richard Taft, 4th ed. [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990]), and inthe lecture course Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”(trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly [Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1997]), out of which Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik arose. Despite some differ-ences in Heidegger’s approach in these works, I shall treat them as complementaryto one another. Heidegger’s later discussions of Kant, in What Is a Thing? (Die Fragenach dem Ding?) and “Kant’s Thesis About Being” (“Kants These über das Sein”), in


Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),pp. 337–63, are (as I shall suggest briefly below) not part of the same interpretiveproject, for in them Heidegger takes a more directly critical stance toward Kant.Citations to these works are to page numbers of the Indiana University Press trans-lations. Citations to the Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]) are to the A/B page numbers, andthose to the Critique of Judgment (trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews [Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000]) and Jäsche Logic (Lectures on Logic, ed. J. MichaelYoung [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992]), are to the Academy vol-ume and page numbers; translations quoted in the text are from the Cambridgetranslations.

2. See, e.g., Phenomenological Interpretation, pp. 14, 136, 196.3. In Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, §§ 1–2 (for example), Heidegger situ-

ates Kant’s project in the context of the history of metaphysics, not epistemology,and takes Kant to be investigating the being of beings and the nature of humantranscendence or finitude.

4. This (long-standing) approach to Kant is exemplified by Henry Allison (e.g.,in his Kant’s Transcendental Idealism [New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1983]).On this view, Kant’s idealism comprises not a metaphysical claim about what objectsare, but an epistemological claim concerning how they appear to us; correspondingly,any philosophical claims about the nature of being must appear “dogmatic”: we mayonly consider what form things must take if they are to be recognized (by us) as“existing.”Allison’s interpretation of Kant seems, however, to inherit at least one as-pect from Heidegger’s, for he (like Heidegger, but not—textually speaking—likeKant) begins with the contrast between human, finite knowledge and God’s knowl-edge or intuitive understanding.

5. This broader construal is not an unreasonable description of what it is to beengaged in transcendental philosophy in general: a recent writer characterizes tran-scendental arguments as those that argue “that one thing (X) is a necessary condi-tion for the possibility of something else (Y). . . . In suggesting that X is a conditionfor Y in this way, the claim is supposed to be metaphysical and a priori, and notmerely natural and a posteriori.” Robert Stern, Transcendental Arguments and Scepti-cism:Answering the Question of Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),p. 3. And Kant’s project in the Critique of Pure Reason may plausibly be said to beginwith experience and/or knowledge and then to establish the legitimacy of certainclaims (synthetic a priori judgments), because they are (or express) necessary condi-tions for the subject’s knowledge or experience. (I cannot here enter into the dis-putes concerning possible differences between transcendental argument—Stern’sconcern—and transcendental philosophy—Kant’s.)

6. Heidegger certainly takes his reading of Kant to concern the subjective condi-tions for the possibility of experience, and takes this philosophical approach to behis philosophical inheritance from Kant (e.g., Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s“Critique of Pure Reason,” pp. 269, 289, 292–93).

7. In the Davos disputation. See Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 195–96,203–7. Cassirer argues, more specifically, that Heidegger ignores the nature of tran-scendental subjectivity as elaborated in the moral philosophy.


8. Ibid., §§ 4–6; as is most explicit in § 5, Heidegger is, then, engaging in “recon-structive” interpretation (supplying a basic, unstated premise).

9. I use judgment broadly here (to include synthesis), as Heidegger (and Kant) do:“Judgment,” Kant writes,“is the representation of the unity of consciousness of vari-ous representations, or representation of their relation insofar as they constitute aconcept” ( Jäsche, para. 17, 9: 101). Or, on Heidegger’s gloss, judgment is the representa-tion of a unity which contains a commonness, with which (unity) many represen-tations agree (Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 163).I shall return to this broad meaning for “judgment” briefly below.

10. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 26–30.11. See, e.g., Critique of Judgment, para. 76. Even Heidegger’s rather less-Kantian-

sounding claim that, for Kant, intuition is the primary mode of knowing, to whichthinking is merely in “service,” might be taken as “loyal” to Kant when understoodwithin Heidegger’s intellectual context, that is, the Marburg neo-Kantian interpre-tations of Kant, according to which (human) cognition comprises—exclusively—conceptual judgment. Heidegger’s vindication, contra these neorationalists, of therole of intuition in cognition, as necessary to provide both “content” (or “matter”)to be synthesized, and as the basic, “immediate” connection of thought to thingsother than the knower, seems to be in a (broadly) Kantian spirit.

12. Indeed Heidegger’s interpretation might be understood as the “flip side” ofthe Anglo-American interpretive tradition, in which Kant’s response to Humeanskepticism has been emphasized to the exclusion of many of Kant’s other concerns.

13. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 203; Kantand the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 60.

14. See § 7 of Heidegger’s History of the Concept of Time:Prolegomena (trans.TheodoreKisiel [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985]), in which he defends, moreexplicitly, this conception of the a priori as the “original” and properly understoodconception (insofar as it explicitly recognizes the role of time as constitutive of themeaning of the a priori) than the epistemological conception. I owe Joseph Rousefor this reference.

15. This is an interpretive claim addressed against the neo-Kantians (and an issuestill contested in Kant interpretation); see, e.g., Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s“Critique of Pure Reason,” para. 2.

16. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” pp. 26–27,32; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 158.

17. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 25.18. Heidegger’s claim is a bit more limited in scope: because Kant is engaged in

ontology concerning beings only as “nature,” Kant’s project is a more specific “ob-jectification,” that is, it articulates the conceptual foundation for a specifically mod-ern scientific point of view/comportment toward beings. Phenomenological Interpre-tation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” pp. 18–19.

19. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, e.g., p. 76.20. Ibid., pp. 95–96. Heidegger’s claim that Kant “shrank back” is, narrowly speak-

ing, based on textual evidence: Kant identifies the imagination as the faculty of syn-thesis in the A edition, and then, in the revised B edition, claims instead that synthesisis a function of the understanding, or that the imagination is merely a subfaculty of the


understanding. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 112–15, Phenomenological Inter-pretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 191.

21. Critique of Pure Reason,A138–39/B177–78.22. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 89–94; Phenomenological Interpretation of

Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 189.23. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 100.24. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 121–23; Phenomenological Interpretation

of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 192. This is, of course, a necessarily abbreviatedoverview of Heidegger’s interpretation. In particular, in concert with Kant’s fulltranscendental deduction arguments, according to which categorial synthesis is anecessary condition for the possibility of a unified experience for a single subject(for the possibility that the “I think” may be joined to any of the “I’s” representa-tions), Heidegger also describes this claim as the explanation how the “I think” maybe joined to time (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 128–31, 135); for reasonsof space, I cannot pursue this full argument (on either side) here.

25. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 58–59.26. Critique of Pure Reason,A99–104.27. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 140.28. Ibid., pp. 121–23.29. Heidegger also argues that the projective imagination is the source of intu-

ition, for we generate the “concepts” of (objective) space and time (pure intuitions)from the imagination as equivalent to primordial time. I leave these arguments asidebecause they are (broadly) consonant with Kant’s considered view: Kant character-izes the Transcendental Aesthetic as a preliminary treatment of space and time as in-dependent of the categories; ultimately (most explicitly at the end of the B-Deduc-tion), however, Kant suggests that (objective) space and time are unified by the pro-ductive imagination synthesizing in accord with the categorial principles.

30. Heidegger’s account need not preclude, however, orthodox Kantian claimsconcerning the illegitimacy of assertions about noumena. For (on Heidegger’s read-ing) the categories apply meaningfully to objects (have “objective reality”) only onthe basis of imaginative synthesis, and thus may well apply only illicitly to objectsthat (as nonintuitable or atemporal) cannot be grasped in imaginative synthesis.

31. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 123.32. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 168–71.33. Critique of Pure Reason,A155/B194.34. See, respectively, Critique of Pure Reason, A55/B79ff., B140–42; and Kant and

the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 20, 27, 42–45.35. The oddity of Kant’s transcendental conception of judging is less commented

upon than it ought to be in much Kant scholarship (as in the common Kantian dic-tum,“all experience is judgmental”); for a good treatment of these issues, see DieterHenrich, The Unity of Reason (ed. Richard L.Velkley, trans. Jeffrey Edwards [Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994]).

36. As Heidegger suggests, e.g., in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 121; seeMichael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago:Open Court, 2000); and Joseph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 2002), concerning Heidegger’s deep-going concern with


just such questions in response to the neo-Kantian or logical positivist focus on thenormativity of logic or scientific claims.

37. Or, in a Sellarsian vein, one might formulate this question as: how can“blind” or “the given” intuitions function as evidence or justification for conceptual,judgmental claims. The nature and severity of the schematism problem is, of course,a highly debated issue, a dispute I must pass over here.

38. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 105; my emphasis.39. Thus Heidegger’s reading may be understood as a successor to the German

Idealist complaint (as, for example, expressed by Schelling) against Kant that Kantoverly restricts his “transcendental” investigation to “formal,” conceptual, or episte-mological considerations, refusing to recognize that these conditions themselves pre-suppose metaphysical conditions (or characteristics of the subject).

40. For instance, e.g., Critique of Pure Reason, B151–52.41. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” p. 203. Hei-

degger, like many others, also finds the table of judgments methodologically ques-tionable, indeed question-begging: Kant introduces new types of judgments (Hei-degger argues) in order to set up his table of categories (ibid., pp. 176–77). BéatriceLonguenesse, in the most sophisticated recent reconstruction of the MetaphysicalDeduction, like Heidegger provides an alternative derivation of the categories fromthe activity of reflection. Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1998).

42. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 38. In Phenomenological Interpretation ofKant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” pp. 186–87, Heidegger provides a somewhat differ-ent account (to the same purpose, however).

43. Jäsche Logic, 9: 94–95.44. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” pp. 158–59;

see also Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 37.45. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 38–39.46. Kant discusses many different kinds of reflective judgment in the Critique of

Judgment, but I shall discuss only two, empirical concept formation and (very briefly)aesthetic judgment.

47. Critique of Judgment, 5: 179.48. Ibid., 5: 184.49. This is a controversial reading of the Critique of Judgment that I defend more

fully elsewhere; see, however, ibid., 5: 220 and 229.50. Ibid., 5: 190, 354.51. Ibid., 5: 183–86.52. One might, correspondingly, gloss Dasein’s authenticity (as characterized in

Being and Time) as a state in which it recognizes itself as purposive without a purpose.53. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 112, n. a; app. 1, pp. 175–76. Heidegger

discusses the Critique of Judgment very little and states that he consulted the Critiqueof Judgment only to make sure that it was not in conflict with his reading. See alsoHeidegger’s comments on Kant’s aesthetics in his Nietzsche lectures; for example,Heidegger there writes that aesthetic judging, on Kant’s view, is “a basic state of hu-man being in which man for the first time arrives at the well-grounded fullness of hisessence” (Heidegger, Nietzsche [2 vols. bound as one], trans. David Farrell Krell


[New York: Harper Collins, 1991], p. 113; my emphasis), where we do not take upthe object “with a view to something else,” but “let what encounters us, purely as itis in itself, come before us in its own structure and worth” (Nietzsche, p. 109).

54. Critique of Judgment, 5: 353.55. Critique of Pure Reason,A104.56. Ibid.,A106.57. Ibid.,A105.58. Despite Heidegger’s recognition of the A-Deduction passages (Kant and the

Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 51–52, 58–59, 108–9); see ibid., p. 203, for Heidegger’s cel-ebration of the “accidentality” of Dasein.

59. In his later works on Kant, Heidegger is more cognizant of the importanceof necessity in Kant’s project (in What Is a Thing? as constitutive for Kant’s [Carte-sian] conception of knowledge as founded upon a priori principles necessarily knownand legislative for nature, and in “Kant’s Thesis on Being,” as characterizing that whichcan be formally attributed to nature because of its connection to the judging subject).He is therefore (I suggest) less friendly to Kant, less willing to see Kant’s project asanticipatory of his own. Such Cartesian, subjectivist, and necessitarian impulses, Hei-degger argues, exemplify the very forgetfulness of being, the occlusion of the groundbeyond the knowing subject, that Heidegger wishes to uncover and rectify.

60. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 165, 189.61. On this, see Joseph Fell, “The Familiar and the Strange: On the Limits of

Praxis in Early Heidegger,” in Heidegger:A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert Dreyfus andHarrison Hall (Blackwell: Oxford, 1992).

62. For another view on this, see David Carr’s chapter in this volume.


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296 Bibliography

A-Deduction, see Deduction-AAbility-to-be (sein-konnen), 51, 54, 57, 59Absolute attitude, of transcendental

onlooker, 144Absolute truth, residue of Christian theol-

ogy, 75Absorbed coping, 17Activity, the content of understanding, 17Actuality, 96Actualization, as union of essence and

existence, 98Agathon, 58, 60, 61Aletheia: in sense of unhiddenness, 64, 140;

not truth, 72; truth, 129Allison, Henry, 222, 252n8.12Als solches Ausgesagtes, 16Angels, 90Angst, see AnxietyAnimal rationale, 81Animals: and differences from humans,

154–60; as “world-poor,” 160Answerability, 55, 59, 61Antecedent zone, 18Antinaturalism, in Husserl, 139Anxiety, 3, 6, 8, 54, 55, 57, 83, 84, 194, 195,

196, 272n12.96; discloses the world asworld, 194, 195, 230; global incapacity,55; liberation from, 83, 84

Apel, Karl-Otto, 65, 73Apophansis, 51Appearance: beings, of, 125; content of

judgment, 16; object of perception, 16,37

Apperception: objective unity of, 36;precedence over categories, 38; self-consciousness, 35; source of cognition,

33; unifying principle of understanding,34, 37

A posteriori knowledge, 5, 112A priori: conditions of experience, 4, 5, 6;

connection between ideas and things,38; contextual, 5, 113, 114, 115, 117;Kant’s view of, 31; knowledge of being,10, 108; knowledge of nature, 36; neces-sity as hallmark of, 22; not negated bydeath of God, 75; ontology, 10, 17, 66;synthetic, 105, 110, 112, 113, 170, 216,225, 231, 250n8.4; transcendental statusof, 110

Apriority: Kantian conception of, 113; sci-entificity incompatible with, 26, 107

Aquinas,Thomas, 74, 75; definition oftruth, 74

Art, role in founding world, 124Articulated concepts, 16, 18Articulation of being, 95, 125Artifacts, 184Artificial intelligence, 13As-structure, 11, 14, 15Aspectuality, 14, 21Assertion, 166Attitude/s (Einstellung), 7, 144–45, 148, 149Authority: bounds freedom, 76; personal

faith, and, 77Authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), 45, 47, 69, 78,

91, 147, 207; demands incarnation, 92;free self-possession of entire Dasein, 91;historicality, and, 212; measured by some-thing divine, 90; replaced by being-here,69; reticent discourse, and, 59, 61

Autonomism, unfettered, contrasted withjustified egoism, 79

Index

Autonomy, and freedom, 77Availability: as actuality in equipment, 95;

zone of, 19Available, the, 12, 52; dependent, as, 20;

disclosed in practical manipulation, 21;ready-to-hand, 18, 88, 123, 161, 163, 167

B-Deduction, see Deduction-BBeautiful, the, 6, 92Beck, Sigismund, 171Bedeutsamkeit, see World, holistic signifi-

cance ofBefindlichkeit, see DispositionBegründen (grounding of something), 60, 61Being: and beings, 67, 68; articulation of,

95; being-question, 122, 137, 138, 145,149, 277n13.45; being there, 120, 123;cannot be reduced to entities, 106; cor-relation with consciousness, 142; hap-pening of, 131; hiddenness of, 71, 205;idealism, 178, 181, 182, 183; meaning of(see Being-question); needs human be-ings, 69; not a property, 70; physical be-ing, and time, 100; place, coming to, 131;place of, 120, 132, 134, 138; potentialityfor, 59; presencing of beings as, 125; preva-lence of, 71–72; question of, 122, 137,138, 145, 148, 149, 177–78, 199, 200, 204;source of measures and constraints, 71;that-being, 96; thematization of, 23;topology of, 120;Western forgetfulnessof, 70, 125; what-being, 96; what beingis/is not, 68; worlding of world, 120,124, 125

Being-a-ground, 49, 50, 57, 58, 59, 61Being-a-self (Selbstsein), 49Being-an-object (Gegenständlichkeit), 101Being-guilty, 84, 209, 242n4.30Being-here, being away, 69, 72Being-in-the-world, 6, 11, 13, 44, 52, 53,

85, 92, 120, 123, 141, 146, 160, 165, 167,168, 174, 184, 203, 205

Being-question (Seinsfrage, die), 3, 6, 122,125, 137, 138, 145, 148, 149, 177–78, 199,200, 204

Being-sense (Seinssinn), 136, 142, 143, 144Being-the-basis-of-a-nullity, 200Being-toward-death, 123, 207–11Being-validity (Seinsgeltung), 136Being and Time, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 17,

23, 25, 47, 50, 57, 60, 61, 63, 67, 122, 135,

140, 169, 215; circularity in, 4, 64, 125;puzzle passages in, 7, 178, 180, 181, 183,184, 185, 188, 193–95

Being-idealism, 178, 181, 182, 183; con-trasted with entity-realism, 178

Beingness, in terms of time, 67Beings: and being, 148; step beyond

(epikeina tes ousias), 58, 244n4.46,246n5.11

Bergson, Henri, and temporalizing ofspace, 124

Berkeley,William, 182Bivalence, 9, 71Blattner,William, vii, 5, 10–27, 54, 182, 185,

186, 187, 236n2.2Brentano, Franz, 139; hypothetical scien-

tific realism, 171

Call of conscience, 50, 59, 61, 62, 84, 90,208, 211; and giving reasons, 59, 62;hearing, 61, 62, 90, 205

Calvin, John, and verticality of transcen-dence, 81

Care (Sorge): as being, 57, 207, 211; asepikeina tes ousias, 58; as locus of humanself-directed intentionality, 160; as tran-scendence of beings toward their being,58; must be sustained, 212; permeatedwith nullity, 200, 207–8; prior to reason,44; three aspects of, 60

Carnap, Rudolf, 7, 169, 172, 175, 176, 209;external world as pseudoproblem, 172,175, 176; world-bracketing, 173

Carr, David, vii, 3, 6, 7, 28Cartesianism, residual, 3Cassirer, Ernst, 6, 29, 79, 81, 82, 216; and

verticality of transcendence, 81Categories, 4–5, 20, 105, 170, 217, 218, 220,

221, 225–26; and time, 220; as a priori,31; destruction of traditional categories,174; rest on intuition, 143

Causality, 38, 217; not derived from experi-ence, 38

Cerbone, David, 178; puzzle passages inBeing and Time, 178

Circumspection, 12Clearing: as place, 132; as truth, 70; bring-

ing to light, 98, 201; not truth, 72; syn-onymous with disclosedness, 69, 201

Cognition, 11, 236n2.5; centered thinking,14; consciousness, acquaintance with,

298 Index

154; derivative, 10; discursiveness of, 155;interpretiveness of, 11, 21; problem of,236n2.5; rule-governed, as, 13; self-sufficient subjective activity, as, 13; sensi-bility, as, 216; sources of, 33, 223; under-standing, as, 17, 216

Cogito, see I think, theCognitive experience and the transcen-

dental, 3Commitment, existential, 59Concepts: as rules for experience, 13;

empty without intuitions, 217; forma-tion, 19, 142, 154

Conceptuality, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21; and objec-tivity, 23; rooted in pre-conceptualgivenness, 125, 230

Conditions of meaning, 5Condition of possibility: in Kant, 4, 63,

236n1.4; in Heidegger, 4, 63, 67, 68Conformity, to social norms, 46, 47, 52Conscience and intentionality, 3Conscience and reason-giving, 3, 9, 61Conscience, 3, 45, 48, 207; and obligation,

55; call of, 50, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62;within the structure of Dasein, 51, 53

Consciousness: and intentionality, 40, 154;correlation with being, 142, 182

Consciousness, self: as apperception, 35; asempirical, 35; care prior to, 44; lack ofadequate concept of, 47; normative, 47;transcendental, 156

Content of representations, 43Contextual a priori, 5, 113, 114, 115, 117;

understanding of being, 118Conflict of world and earth, 68Coping, precognitive, engaged, 21Critique of Pure Reason, 1, 4, 16, 17, 28, 35;

Analytic of Principles, 20Crowell, Steven, vii, 3, 9, 25, 43–62

Dahlstrom, Daniel O., vii, 7, 8, 9, 63–73Dasein (see also Da-Sein), 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12,

15, 20, 21, 23, 31, 32, 44, 64, 65, 66, 67,122, 140; absorbed, as, 12; active subjectof letting be, as, 93, 94; always involvedin falling, as, 147, 179, 189, 205; ambigu-ity in, 177; authenticity, 59, 61, 147,283n14.52; being there/here as, 123;being-a-ground, 49, 57; being-guilty, 84,209, 242n4.30, 279n13.53; being-in-the-world, 52, 53, 54, 85, 92, 120, 123, 141,

146, 160, 165, 167, 168, 174, 176, 182,198; care, and, 44, 57, 58, 84, 122, 124,145, 159, 160, 201, 204, 206, 278n13.52;condition for world, 150; death, recogni-tion of, 123, 124; depends on the future,64; disclosedness of, 45, 47, 51, 68, 107,201; discovery, and, 99–100; disposition,51; enclosed, as, 13; equipmentality, 124,161, 165; existential structure of, 51, 137;finitude of, 203; hyphenation of, 128;independence, 47, 97, 183, 184, 194; in-sufficiency of, 64, 68; intentionality,and, 159, 160, 161, 165; legitimation, 61;manifests and is also being, 148, 177;mediates meaning of being, 150; non-existence of, 185, 186; not ontic, 82; on-tological constitution of, 32, 177; onto-logically unique, 202; openness, as, 129;out of inner sphere, 13; out there, as, 13;posited as, 50; pre-predicative involve-ments of, 51; projection, 69; question of being, and, 123; reconfigured, 128;regional ontology of, 177; socializedOne, as, 45; sovereignty, 58; temporalityof, 4, 20, 124, 145; thrown, as, 50, 92,204; thrownness, 54, 58, 68, 92, 207,278n13.49; transcendence, and, 128;transcendental agency of, 177; transcen-dental structure of, 31, 44, 81, 128; truthrelative to, 74; turning, 126; unclosednessin, 200; understanding, 69; world found-ing, and, 124

Da-Sein, 129, 131, 245n5.2, 260n9.27; akinto topos, 129; between, the, as, 129; hap-pening of, 131

Davidson, Donald, 13, 122, 188Davos dispute, 6, 29, 79, 81, 83, 203Death: being-toward, 123, 208, 210,

278n13.51; disposition of, 54; Hegel’sview of, 212–13; nothingness, as, 131,207; whole, the and, 84, 207

Death of God, 74Deduction, transcendental, 28, 30; quid juris

as derivation of, 28–34, 38Deduction-A, 18, 32, 41, 156, 219, 220, 229Deduction-B, 23, 36, 153, 154, 156, 219Deliberation, 47, 48, 52Depraz, Natalie, 144Descartes, Rene, 13, 31, 34, 35, 66; tran-

scendental, emergence of, 136, 140Description, as grasping-in-words, 25

Index 299

Dewey, John, and Heidegger, 17, 21Ding an sich, see Thing in itselfDisclosedness: consequence of delibera-

tion, 47; essentially factical, 107, 112;truth as, 8, 45, 107

Discourse (Rede), 50; always time and cul-ture dependent, 75; giving reasons, and,51, 59; reticence, 59, 61

Discourse of being: articulation of intelli-gibility, 52; name changes, 26; priority toempirical sciences, 26

Disposition (Befindlichkeit), 51, 52; Angst, of,53; care structure, and, 60; death, of, 53

Doctrine of transcendental object, 36Dreyfus, Hubert, 12, 13, 17, 56, 183, 206,

237n2.13; and artificial intelligence, 13Dwelling: being-in-place, 131; manner of

mortal being, 131

Earth, concealment of, 120Eckhartian mysticism, 171Ecstasis, 34Egoism, justified, 78; contrasted with false

subjectivism, 79Eidetic character of phenomenology, 41,

66Eidos and morphe, 96, 97Eigenständigkeit, see IndependenceEigentlichkeit, see AuthenticityEmpirical realism, 8, 37Encountering things, 121; as interrela-

tional, 122; as prior involvement, 122Encyclopaedia Britannica, Husserl-Heidegger

controversy, 136, 149, 262n10.6Entschlossenheit, see ResolutenessEntity-realism, 178, 181; contrasted with

being-idealism, 178Entities: absencing of, 68, 70; accessibility

of, 106; a priori knowledge of, 21, 217;cannot be reduced to being, 106; do notprevail, 71; idealism, 178; independence,13, 47, 97, 181, 183, 184, 185; intentional-ity, and, 43, 159; normativity, and, 45; notself-identifying, 108; objectness of, 128;ontic knowledge of, 112, 244n4.48; pas-sive object of letting be, as, 93; perfor-mances, accomplishments of conscious-ness, 137; presencing of, 68, 70, 124, 230;projection of being of, 106, 111; purediscovery of, 238n2.43; readiness-to-

hand, 18, 68, 88, 123, 161, 163, 167, 181;respective beingness of, 68; sense-repre-sentation, 35; temporal structure of, 21,68; timely spacing and spacious timingof, 68; uncoveredness of, 202

Epikeina tes ousias, see Beings, step beyondEpistemological transcendence, 66Epistemology, external world as central

problem of, 171Epoché (suspension of natural attitude),

141, 144, 148, 149, 150Equipment: and structure of the world,

123; letting be, 94Equipmentality, 124, 161–63, 165, 167Ereignis (event of being): Da-Sein as turn-

ing point in, 129; gathering of/openingof/into place, 131

Erkennen, see PerceptionErkenntnis, 11, 236n2.5. Ssee also CognitionEssence and existence, 71, 96, 97, 98,

251n8.7Essentia, and existentia, 96, 97Establishing: letting be, 97, 120; world, 130Eternal truths, 6, 74, 85Ethics, bound to logic, 79Event, the, 68; appropriation of being-here,

72; of being, 69, 71, 131, 212Existentia, and essentia, 96, 97Existentialia, 174Existentiality, 59, 201Existentiell, contrasted with existential, 68Existenz, 34Experience: always already, 217, 218, 225,

252n8.14; concepts as rules for, 13;grounded upon activities of synthesis,217; horizon of validity, 136, 141, 203,206; meaning of, 88; not possible with-out causality, 38; of a person, 92; of thebeautiful, 92; pre-ontological, 218; pre-sumes a world, 147; temporal structureof, 18, 19; understanding of, 88, 106

Experiential data, and unity, 19Explicit nature of interpretation, 12, 16External world, problem of, 7, 169, 171;

Carnap’s pseudoproblem solution,172–73; Heidegger’s meaningless issue,171, 173ff, 183, 187, 252n8.18; Moore’scommon sense solution, 172; provabilityof, 236n2.5

Externalist theory of self, 122

300 Index

Facticity, as being there, 12Faith, 79–80; mortal enemy of philosophy,

80Falling (Verfallen), 146, 147, 179, 189, 205;

being lost in the world, 147, 205Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 171Fink, Eugen, 139, 143First-person self-awareness, 58First philosophy, 6, 135; defined, 135For-the-sake-of-which (Worumwillen), 151,

165, 176, 206Foreconception (Vorgriff), 14, 15, 16Forehaving (Vorhabe), 14Foresight (Vorsicht), 14, 15Forestructure (Vorstruktur), 14Forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit),

70, 72, 125, 126, 128, 275n13.29Formal and material ontologies, 149Forster, Friedrich Wilhelm, 76Foucault, Michel, no power-neutral ac-

counts of sense making, 202Fourfold, the, 2, 4, 88, 130; co-present in

the presencing of things, 88; explicationof, 89–90

Freedom: normative, the, 60; requires au-thority, 76, 77; self-transcendence, 80–81;taking over being-a-ground, 60

Frede, Dorothea, 181; being idealism, 181Fries, Jacob, psychological Kantianism, 170Fundamental-ontological transcendence,

66Fundamental ontology, 93

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 56, 119, 120, 125Gathering of world, 130, 134Gegenstehen, das, 31, 35. See also ObjectivityGegenstandsbeziehung, see IntentionalityGegenständlichkeit, see Being-an-object;

ObjectivityGegenübersteht, see Standing over againstGeistesleben, see Spirit, life of theGeviert, see Fourfold, theGethmann, Carl-Friedrich, 50, 56Givenness, 148; higher order, 143; of objec-

tivity, 140, 230; of preconceptuality, 136God, death of, 74God’s-eye view, desire for, 8, 76, 182Good, the, 6; transcendence connected

with, 58Grasping in one, 19

Ground, 50; as history, tradition or socialpractice, 56; as reason, 49, 58; not reason,56

Ground of a nullity, 55, 56Grounding, 60, 136, 243n4.31; genuine vs.

apparent, 136; three ways of, 60Grundquellen, see Understanding, basic

sources ofGültigkeit, seeValidity, of judgmentsGuilt (Schuldig), 48, 49, 54, 58, 207; and re-

sponsibility, 55, 208; essential to Dasein,84; without reference to social norms,55; take over being-a-ground, 58

Guyer, Paul, 222

Happening of being, coming to place, 131Harries, Karsten, vii, 6, 7, 74–92Haugeland, John, viii, 8, 55, 59, 93–103, 202Having-to-be, 51Hegel, Georg, 83, 208, 213; Phenomenology

of Spirit, 83, 212Heidegger, Martin: angels, 90; anxiety, 3,

6, 8, 54, 55,57, 83, 84, 85; apriority andscientificity incompatible, 26, 107; asser-tion, 166; Auseinandersetzung, with neo-Kantians, 34; authority, 77; being, asource of measures and constraints, 71;being-in-the-world, 52, 53, 85, 92, 120,123, 141, 146, 160, 165, 167, 168, 174; be-ing-question, 122, 137, 138, 145, 148, 149,177–78, 199, 200, 206; Cartesian way,rejection of, 136; clearing as truth, 201;clearing as truth, retraction of, 64, 68,72, 73; conscience, 48, 49, 53, 90; delib-eration, 47, 48, 49; defines transcen-dence, 30, 31; descriptive methodology,125; Deweyan pragmatism, and, 21,237n2.29; early thought, 10, 236; equip-mentality, 124, 161–63, 165, 167; existen-tial truth, 49; external world, 173ff; fac-ticity, 120; faith, 79–80; forgiveness, 214;Gadamer, influence on, 119; guilt, 48, 49;hermeneutic idealism, 105, 106, 109, 118,250n8.3; Hölderlin, and, 9; Husserl, linkswith, 9, 35, 40, 41, 135–50, 262n10.5;imagination, 33, 34; intelligibility, possi-bility of, 201; intentionality, 35, 44, 51,160; justified egoism, 78, 79; Kant, and,3, 9, 17, 28–42, 67, 104, 151–68, 201,215–31, 235n1, 245n5.3; language never

Index 301

pure or innocent, 75; language never pureor innocent, and meaning, 183; laterthought, 1, 6, 9, 64, 68; messengers ofthe godhead, 90; mystical, transforma-tion to, 88; National Socialism and, 76;necessity terms, deletion of, 230; onto-logical project, 10, 21, 174; ontologicalproject, metontology, 273n12.103; ontol-ogy in Kant, assertion of, 3; personalfaith, 77, 248n6.18; phenomenologicalmethod, 138, 139, 174; philosophy, on,77, 169, 173, 205, 214, 262n10.7; politics,and, 277n13.43; pragmatist, as, 10, 17, 21,22; preference for A-Deduction, 35; pro-jection, 110; puzzle passages, 7, 178, 180,181, 183, 184, 185, 193–95; questions basisof transcendental deduction, 28, 30, 31,33; quid juris, questions, 28–34, 38, 42, 217,231; readiness-to-hand, 18, 68, 88, 123,161, 179, 183, 184, 188, 189; rejection ofepistemology in Kant, 3, 30; rejection ofscientificity, 27; rejection of value the-ory, 71; representationalism, 10, 236n2.2,237n2.23; residues of Christian theology,76; scandal of philosophy, 173; self-con-sciousness, and 45, 47; temporal idealism,250n8.3; theological strand in, 76; topo-graphical thinking, 4, 126; topologicalorientation, 130, 134; topology of being,120; transcendence, being as, 127; tran-scendence, problem of, 33, 37,127, 128;transcendence, shift away from, 129,130, 201; transcendental realist, as, 195,251n8.10; transcendentalist, as, 10, 17, 21,140, 254n8.21; triadic inconsistency, 23;truth, as being, 63ff; truth that prevails,65, 68; turning, the, 2, 63ff, 76, 126, 128;what Kant wanted to say, and, 30, 38,215; world as bedrock and prelinguistic,176

Heidegger, Martin (works): Basic Problemsof Phenomenology, 12, 22, 29, 96, 109, 145,146, 201; Being and Time, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11,22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 41, 47, 50, 57, 60,61, 63, 77, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95,99, 100, 102, 104, 106, 107, 111, 122, 123,124, 126, 129, 134, 140, 145, 146, 169,173, 179, 180, 182, 215; Beiträge (seeContributions to Philosophy);“Building,Dwelling,Thinking,” 130; Contributions

to Philosophy, 8, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 128,130; Conversation on a Country Path, 132;“Dialogue with a Japanese,” 91; History ofthe Concept of Time, 138, 143, 145; Intro-duction to Metaphysics, 91, 201; Introductionto Philosophy, 109; Kant and the Problem ofMetaphysics, 29, 110, 123, 203;“Letter on‘Humanism’,” 126;“Letter to Richard-son,” 138;“Letter to Eugen Fink,” 139;“My Way to Phenomenology,” 138; Niet-zsche, 200;“New Research on Logic,” 79;“On the Essence of Ground,” 57, 59, 60,140, 244n4.45; Ontology:The Hermeneuticsof Facticity, 25, 123; Phenomenological Inter-pretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,”29, 31, 34, 104;“Phenomenology andTheology,” 79; The End of Philosophy andthe Task of Thinking, 129;“The Essence of Truth,” 108;“The Idea of Philosophyand the Problem of World-Views,” 24;The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic,127, 193;“The Origin of the Work ofArt,” 88, 119, 120, 124;“The QuestionConcerning Technology,” 192;“TheThing,” 130;“Rectorial Address,” 76, 77,82, 126;“Remarks on the PhilosophicalOrientation of Academics,” 77; WhatIs a Thing?, 109, 111, 189, 190;“What IsMetaphysics?,” 26, 77, 209

Herbart, Johann Friedrich, hypotheticalscientific realism, 171

Herder, Johann Gottfried, 75Hereclitus, on logos as primordial gather-

ing, 91, 92Hermeneutic transformation, 5Hermeneutics, 23, 24Hiddenness/unhiddenness, 64, 71, 120 140,

205; of being, 71; of Earth, 120Hinsehen, 11Homecoming, 6, 84, 85, 134Historicality, 18, 203, 212Historicity, see HistoricalityHölderlin, Friedrich, 90, 134, 119; home-

coming in, 134, 261n9.35; influence onHeidegger, 90

Homeland and homelessness, 261n9.43Horizon of validity, 136, 206Human: disclosed in self-understanding,

21; subjectivity, 7, 174Hume, David, 32

302 Index

Husserl, Edmund, 1, 4, 6, 13, 41, 50, 135–50,149, 171, 178; alleged neglect of being-question, 138; antinaturalism, 139; beingof the world, 137; Cartesian Meditations,41, 139, 143; Cartesian way, adoption of,136, 148; central importance of inten-tionality, 39, 40; common sense, attitudeof, 148; corporality of transcendentalego, 144; disinterested spectator, attitudeof, 148; external world, problem of, 171,178; Crisis, 137, 148, 149; Erste Philosophie,136, 141; first philosophy, 135, 136, 141;formal and material ontologies, 149;Ideas I, 40, 41, 135, 138, 142, 146; Ideas II,146; Heidegger, links with, 35, 40, 41,135–50, 262n10.5; Letztbegründung (ulti-mate foundation), 136; Letzter Sinn (ulti-mate sense), 136; Logical Investigations,135, 139, 146; objectivity, 137; ontologies,formal and material, 149; Passive and Ac-tive Synthesis, 142; Phenomenological Psy-chology, 138, 147; phenomenology of,41; Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, 139,146; personalistic attitude, 145, 147; prin-ciple of principles, 24; psychologism,rejection of, 39, 41, 139; Seinsgeltung(being-validity), 136; Seinssinn, (being-sense), 136; time-consciousness, 238n2.36;transcendental contrasted with psycho-logical, 137; transcendental idealism, 171,263n10.42; way of ideas, rejection of, 39;world, being of the, 137

Hypokeimenon, 30Hypothetical scientific realism, 171

I think, the, 31, 34, 35, 151–68; as temporalsynthesis, 34; as unifier of Grundquellenand Stämme, 33; as representing an ob-ject, 36

Idealism, question of, 6, 7, 140; Kant’s re-jection of, 7, 35–36, 39; German, 171;hermeneutic, 105, 106, 109, 118; linguis-tic, 8; transcendental, 7, 105, 143, 171

Imagination, 33, 34, 157, 219; function ofthe soul, 157; productive and transcen-dental, 33, 34; primacy over understand-ing, 219; relation to time, 219; root ofsense and understanding, 34, 223, 226

Independence (Eigenständigkeit), 13, 47, 97,181, 183, 184, 185, 194

Independent object, 13, 183, 185In-der-Welt-Sein, see Being-in-the-worldIndividualism, contrasted with justified

egoism, 79Inexplicit nature of understanding, 12, 17Infinite, constituted by finite as totality, 83Inner sphere, 13In-order-to, 12Infinite regress, 7Intelligibility, 202, 203Intentionality (Gegenstandsbeziehung): asser-

tion, and, 166; central importance of, 39;comportments, 160; conscience, and, 3,9; equipmentality, and, 161–64; groundedin ec-static nature of Dasein, 146; Hei-degger on, 51, 146, 164–65; human/animaldivide, and, 154–60; Husserl on, 40, 145;internal realism, 5; necessary and suffi-cient conditions for, 52; reason, and, 43,61; transcendental, the and, 3, 35, 145;rules, and, 45; self, and, 151, 158, 164, 165;social practices, and, 45; tools and, 3

Interpretation: conscious form of dealingwith the world, 12; constituted by as-structure, 11, 14, 15, 109; development ofunderstanding, 14, 237n2.5; derivative of understanding, 11, 12, 109, 113; ex-plicit nature of, 12, 14, 16; judgment in,34; nonthematic nature of, 12; percep-tion as act of, 15

Intersubjectivity, 144Intuition, 16; blind without concepts, 217,

220, 283n13.37; categorical, 139, 143; con-cepts originate in, 142; pure forms of, 105;sense-representation and, 35; serviced bythinking, 217, 218, 281n14.11; supersen-suous being and, 139; time, and, 18, 220

Isolated subject, 31

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 170, 266n12.5;naïve sentimental realism, 170

Jaspers, Karl, 64Judgment, 16; assertion, as, 167; determina-

tive or reflective, 216, 226, 227, 228; for-mation and representation, 151, 166;founded, 139; holding of (Geltung), 34;imagination, and, 219; objective validity,23; propositional, 23; reflective or deter-minative, 216; synthetic, 105, 110, 218,221, 225, 231; validity of (Gültigkeit), 34

Index 303

Justified egoism, 78; contrasted with falsesubjectivism, 79

Kant, Immanuel, 1, 4, 6, 7, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20,21, 28, 30ff, 35, 36, 39, 67, 75, 86, 87, 88,105, 106, 110, 122, 125, 152, 153, 154, 155,169, 170, 178, 182, 215–18, 225, 228, 229,230, 231; cognition, and, 154; conceptu-alization of the preconceptual, 225;Copernican revolution, 6, 39, 75, 105;Critique of Judgment, 88, 216, 228, 229;Critique of Pure Reason, 1, 4, 16, 17, 20,28, 35, 122, 125, 215–18, 225, 230, 231;Ding an sich, 169, 170; epistemology, and,215; experience, 216; external worldproblem, 169, 178; Heidegger on, 67,215–31; idealism, 7, 35, 105, 106, 182; in-tentionality and, 34ff; island of truth, 86,87; judgment, 152; knowledge of naturalscience, and, 36; Lectures on Logic, 153,154, 155; perception, 153; projection, 110;refutation of Idealism, 7, 35, 169; repre-sentation, and, 152, 153, 154; sense-repre-sentations (Eindrücke), 36; sensibility, 216;skepticism, 36, 37; transcendentalism, 17,50, 215; transcendentalism, presupposesprimacy of practice, 21; transcendental,apperception, 19, 32; transcendental,borrows from Christian theology, 75;transcendental, consciousness, 156; tran-scendental, deduction, 28, 30, 33; tran-scendental, idealism, 252n8.12; transcen-dental, realism, 37, 106; transcendental,recovery of, 136; transcendental, self-consciousness, 151; transcendental, sub-jectivity, 170; transcendental, synthesis,219, 221; transcendental, understanding,216, 237n2.5; transcendental, Vorstellung,36; transcendental, way of ideas, 36, 37

Kehre, die, see Turning, theKennen, see PerceptionKierkegaard, So/ren, 207Kisiel,Theodore, 11, 24, 25, 104Kitcher, Patricia, 222Knowing (Erkenntnis), 236n2.5Knowledge: human, both intuitive and dis-

cursive, 217; of sensible world, 35, 36Körner, Stephan, 235n2

LaFont, Cristina, viii, 5, 6, 7, 104–18,243n4.34

Language: already objectifying, 25; being,and, 91, 183; dissociated from reason, 51;Herder’s view on, 75; never pure or in-nocent, 75

Layering apart, 12Lebenswelt, see Life-worldLeistungen, 137Letting be, 8, 93–103; and Einstein, 99–103;

and Newton, 99–103, 111; as enabling,99, 101, 120; as establishing, 120; as fiat,103; Dasein as active subject of, 93; enti-ties as passive object of, 93; four basicsenses in English, 94

Letting-be-seen, 51, 120, 143Letztbegründung, see Ultimate foundationLetzter Sinn, see Ultimate senseLiberation, self, 81Life-world (Lebenswelt), 147Limits of transcendental reflection, 6Linguistic idealism, 8, 14Locke, John, 136; idea, defined, 36; natural-

istic distortion in, 136Logic: authority of, 78; productive, 17, 25;

transcendental, 79Logical empiricism, 14Logos, 74; a being or primordial gathering,

91; of mattering, 207; subjected to timeand place, 76; Old Testament under-standing of, 91

Looking at, 11Löwith, Karl, 64

MacGuffin, 3, 199, 273n13.1, 274n13.2Mach, Ernst, phenomenological positivism,

171Maimon, Salomon, 171, 266n12.7Malpas, Jeff, viii, 4, 7, 119–34, 236n1.3Man, das, 3, 147. See also One, theMathematical functionalization, 237n2.18Meaning, 3, 9; can fail, 3; conditions of, 5;

determines reference, 115, 116; Hegelian,3–4, 212–13

Mental health, bound to logic, 79Metaphysics, forgetfulness of being, 125, 126Metaphysical projection, 117; change of

concerning science, 109Metaphysical transcendence, 247n512Mind: always in the world, 3; and represen-

tation, 37; as isolated subject, 31; as basicsources (Grundquellen), 33; as roots(Stämme), 33; as outside of itself, 38

304 Index

Moore, G. E., 7, 169, 172, 175, 176; externalworld and common sense, 172, 175, 176

Moran, Dermot, viii, 6, 135–50Morphe and eidos, 96, 97Mulhall, Stephen, 183

Natural attitude, 7, 144, 147; suspension of(epoché), 141, 144, 149

Nature, 56Necessity, 5; as hallmark of the a priori, 22,

284n14.59Neo-Kantians, Southwest school of, 34Neutral monism, 170Nichts, das, see Nothing, theNietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 74, 85–86, 202; in-

telligibility, 202;“On Truth and Lies in aNonmoral Sense,” 74, 85–86

Nihilism: and pursuit of objective truth, 87;obliviousness to being’s prevalence, 71

Noemata, 13Nonreductive analysis, 2Nonthematic nature of understanding, 12Norms: acting in accord with, 46, 57, 58;

acting in light of, 46, 57, 58; and free-dom, 60; being-here as a source of, 71

Nothing, the, 3, 199, 200, 204, 207, 209Not thinking, 6Noumenon, 84Nullity (Nichtigeit, die), ground of a, 55, 56,

207, 210

Objectification, 238n2.43Objects, see EntitiesObjectivity: a priori constitution of, 31,

140; conceptuality, and, 23; Husserl on,137, 141, 145; judgment, and, 23, 219

Obscurity, 8Observational determination, 11Occurrence: and independence, 20, 184,

185, 189, 194, 196; compared with prac-tice, 59; disclosed in detached cognition,21. See also Present-at-hand

Okrent, Mark, ix, 3, 7, 151–68One, the (das Man), 45, 47, 52, 53, 205,

243n4.36Ontic discourse, 12Ontic truth, 5, 9, 48, 60, 61, 66, 110, 111,

117, 149; presupposes ontological truth,31

Ontic transcendence, 66Onto-theology, 91

Ontology, 10; about the Nothing, 26; andtemporal unity of experience, 19; asconception of object in general, 20;as theoretic-conceptual, 23; eideticgrounding of, 96; expresses a prioritemporality, 21; formal, 142; formal, andmaterial, 149; fundamental, 66, 93, 149,204, 206; immune to empirical refuta-tion, 21; is a priori, 21; metontology(ontology of nature), 273n12.103; newscience, 146; phenomenology as methodof, 145, 146; regional, 177; transcenden-tal, 10; triadic inconsistency, 23

Ontological commitment, 40Ontological difference, 105, 106, 133Ontological transcendence, 66Ontological truth, 5, 66, 110, 117; as dis-

closedness, 45Opening, 129; and presence, 130; as place,

132Originary time, 102, 223, 225Ort, see PlaceOrtschaft, 120Out-on-its-own-ness, 97Out there, 13Outer sphere, 13

Paradigm shift, concerning science, 109Paradox of subjectivity, 6, 7Perception: and consciousness of entities,

182; as act of interpretation (kennen), 15,16, 153; as source of cognition (erkennen),33, 142; object of, directly given, 40, 230;taking a thing in, 11

Personal faith, 77Phenomenological method, 22, 125, 138,

139; access to objectivity, 25; descriptive,125; nonempirical access to being, 25;thematizes being, 23; verbal expressionof, 25; visionary, 125

Phenomenological: ontology, 135; posi-tivism, 171; reduction, 7

Phenomenological truth, contrasted withtranscendental truth, 66

Phenomenology: eidetic character of, 41,66; hermeneutic, 174; intentional, 145;method not a standpoint, 145, 146; tran-scendental, 1, 24, 41

Philipse, Herman, ix, 7, 8, 27, 169–98Philosophical texts, interpretation of: crite-

ria for, 180

Index 305

Philosophy, 5, 6, 10, 21, 24, 27, 77; and sci-entificity, 21, 27; focuses on the neces-sary, 21; Heidegger on, 77, 169, 173, 205,213, 214, 231; primary establishment(Urstiftung), 136, 141; scandal of, 169–98;sedimented history of, 135, 136; theoretic-conceptual nature of, 10, 24

Philosophy, transcendental, 50, 140Pippin, Robert B., ix, 3, 6, 45, 46, 57,

199–214Place: concealment of Earth, 120; Da of

being, 132; gathering of, 134; happeningof, 131; happening of truth, 124; of be-ing, 132, 134; openness of World, 120,129; presencing of entities, 124; site ofactivity by Dasein, 129; worldling ofWorld, 120, 124

Plato: construal of entities, 66; ideal, the,136

Poetry: direct encounter with being, 27;role in founding world, 124; voices ofangels, 90

Positivity, of worldview philosophy, 21Possibility: correlation to phenomenology,

138; of understanding, 105Potentiality for being, 59Practical, subject as, 7Practice: compared with occurrence, 59;

primacy of, 10, 11, 17, 21, 22, 45; triadicinconsistency, 23

Practice, social, 57, 58Pragmatic strand in philosophical enquiry,

5, 17, 21Preconceptuality, of understanding, 16, 17,

135Predicative assertion (apophansis), parasitical

on letting be seen, 51Present-at-hand, 18, 20, 52, 68, 88, 179,

207; and independence, 20, 183Primacy of practice, 10, 11, 17, 21, 22, 24;

and discourse of being, 26; and transcen-dental ontology, 22; and triadic inconsis-tency, 23

Principle of principles, not theoretical, 24Problem of the external world, 7Process, of knowing, 37Production, and letting be, 96, 97Projection, 5, 110, 124, 238n2.43Propositional truth, 8, 14Propositionality, 14, 16, 17; obstacle to ac-

cess to being, 26

Psychological Kantianism, 170Psychologism in logic, rejection of, 39, 41,

139Psychology: logic, and/or, 33, 40; transcen-

dentalism, and/or, 137, 145Putnam, Hilary, 5, 113, 114, 115; contextual

a priori, 113, 114, 115, 255nn8.36–47; in-ternal realism, 5

Purposiveness, 5Puzzle passages, 7, 178, 180, 181, 183, 184,

185, 193–95

Question of being, 3, 6, 122, 125, 137, 138,145, 148, 149, 177–78, 199, 200, 204

Quaestio juris, 4, 28–34, 38, 42, 217, 231Quid juris, derivation of deduction, 28–34, 38Quiddity (Wasgehalt), 110

Ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), 18, 68, 88,123, 161, 163, 167, 179, 181, 183, 184,188–93, 196, 207

Realism: empirical, 8, 106; Heidegger’s, 8;internal, 5; metaphysical, 106; naïve sen-timental realism, 170; scientific, 8; tran-scendental, 37, 39, 106

Realism/idealism debate, 7Reality, dependent on care, 202Reason: account giving, as, 59, 60, 61,62;

care prior to, 43, 44; connection withresoluteness, 59; freedom, and, 60; dis-cursive practice, as, 50, 51; hearing, as,62; occluded in Heidegger’s ontology,44, 45, 50; something that speaks forsomething, 242n4.17, 243n4.33

Reflective judgment, 5Reinhold, Karl, 170; neutral monism or

syncretism, 170Representation: and content, 43; and self,

151; employment of, 44; having, 37; sub-ject as, 7; synthesic, 156; taking as, 37

Representationalism, Husserl’s attack on,39–40

Resoluteness, 48, 49, 59, 60, 77, 84; anddeath, 84; and giving reasons, 60; as sov-ereignty, 59; loyalty of existence, 77

Respective beingness (Seindheit), 68Responsiveness, 9Rice University, 9Rickert, Heinrich, 104Rules, 13, 45, 58, 224, 225, 237, 241; consti-

tutive, 241n4.8; following, 224, 225,

306 Index

244n4.47; limits of, 13, 237n2.13; inten-tionality of, 45

Sätze, 16Scandal of philosophy, 169–98Scanlon,T. M., 50, 243n4.32Schuldig, see GuiltSchulze, Gottlob Ernst, 171, 266n12.6Science: debunked as measure for knowl-

edge, 191, 198; begins in philosophy, 82;change of metaphysical projection, 109

Scientific laws, 99–101, 141Scientific ontology, 5; incompatible with

apriority, 26; must be hermeneutic, 24;triadic inconsistency, 23

Scientific projection, thematizing, 98, 109Scientific realism, 8Searle, John, 14Seeing, and analytical method, 125Sein-konnen, see Ability-to-beSein und Zeit, see Being and TimeSeindheit, see Respective beingnessSeinsfrage, die, see Being-questionSeinsgeltung, see Being-validitySeinssinn, see Being-senseSeinsvergessenheit, see Forgetfulness of beingSeinsversständnis, see Understanding of

beingSelbstsein, see Being-a-selfSelf: and thing interrelated, 122, 123; eter-

nalist theory of, 122; significance inHeidegger, 78

Self-contained subject, 13Self-consciousness, 35;“care” prior to, 44;

nature of, 151; philosophical, 135Self-possession, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79; death,

and, 85, 248n6.21; strengthening of, 79,248n6.23

Self-transcendence, 6, 79, 81, 85Self-unity, 84, 85Sense-representation, and intuition, 35Sensible world, knowledge of, 35Serviceable, being, see Ready-to-handSignificance, 95Skepticism, 31, 36, 37, 39Smith,A. D., 143Social practice, 57, 58Socialized One (das Man), 45, 47, 52, 53Something asserted, 16Something speaking for something,

242n4.17, 243n4.33

Something-as-something, 12Sorge, see CareSovereignty: and resoluteness, 59; as first-

person self-awareness, 58Space, temporalizing of, 124Spacious timing of entities, 68Spirit, life of the (Geistesleben), 145Spiritual homecoming, 84, 85Stämme (roots of understanding), 33Standing over against (gegenübersteht), 31, 36Stätte, see PlaceStrawson, P. F., 222Stroud, Barry, 235n2Subject and object not separate, 3Subject: as knower, 37; as practical, 7; as

outside itself, 34, 66, 277n13.34; as repre-sentation, 7; idealized, 75; independent,13

Subjectivity, role of, 6, 7, 145, 150, 219; sub-ject of, 34, 67, 215

Surveyable zone (Umkreis), 19Syncretism, 170Synthesis, 4, 8, 16, 156, 216, 222, 225Synthetic a priori, 105, 110, 111, 113, 122,

231

Taking as representation, 37Taking a thing in (Vernehmen, das), 11, 13,

15, 61, 237n2.5Taking to heart, 62Temporality (Zeitlichkeit, die), 5, 19; and

care, 212; and equipmental engagement,123; and imagination, 219, 222; of enti-ties, 68, 200; original, 219, 223

Temporal unity of experience, 19That-being (existentia), 96Thematic nature of interpretation, 12, 23,

238n2.43Thematizing objectifies, 23, 98Theoretic-conceptual nature of philoso-

phy, 10, 24Theoretisch-begrifflich (theoretical-conceptual),

10Thing, 2; and self, 122, 123; appearance, 37;

encountering, 121; opening understand-ing, 120

Thing in itself (Ding an sich), 37, 45, 169,170, 171, 178, 179ff, 186, 188, 189, 197,266n12.3

Thomas Aquinas, 74, 75; definition oftruth, 74

Index 307

Thöma, Dieter, 79Thought: and intuition, 35, 220; and sensi-

bility, 219Threefold synthesis, theory of, 32, 33, 34,

238n2.36Thrown, nature of Dasein, 54, 58, 92Time: categories, and, 20, 220; conscious-

ness in Husserl, 238n2.36; different sortsof, 102; originary, 102, 223, 225; pureform of, 19; spatialization of, 124

Timely spacing of entities, 68Time-space, 129Tools, 124, 161, 165, 167, 184Topological orientation, of Heidegger’s

thought, 130, 134, 261n9.33Topology of being, 120, 124Topos, see PlaceTranscendence, 1, 2, 41; and freedom, 60;

and unity of world, 133; bifurcation of,133; connected with the Good, 58; epis-temological, 66; fundamental-ontological,66; horizontality of, 83; ontic, 66; onto-logical, 66; problem of, 133; verticalityof, 81

Transcendental, the, 1, 2; negative disposi-tion in Anglo-Saxon thought, 2, 235n2

Transcendental: apperception, 19, 32, 40;attitude, 7, 144, 149; deduction, 4, 28, 30,33; ego, 139, 150; embodiment of, 144,150; idealism, 7, 105, 106, 140, 143, 171,181, 182, 255n8.30; imagination, 218; in-quiry, 2; inquiry, and intentionality, 3;inquiry, cannot produce an aught, 83; in-quiry, character of, 2, 4–6; inquiry, con-trasted with psychological, 137; inquiry,normative significance of, 83; inquiry,scope of, 2–4, 7; inquiry, subjectivity andidealism, role of, 2; inquiry, cognitiveexperience, 3; logic, 6, 79; nonreductiveanalysis, 2, 236n1.3; object, doctrine of,36; ontology, 10; phenomenology, 1, 2, 6,135, 145; philosophy, 50, 104, 140, 170,201; realism, 37, 39, 106, 171, 181, 182,195, 197; reflection, limits of, 74ff; reflec-tion, and a path to the Fourfold, 88; self-consciousness, 151; subject, 6; subject, asagent, 223; subject, as care, 50; subject, asexperiencing subject, 223; subject, atem-porality of, 222; subject, identical withDivinity, 171; truth, 8, 63–73; truth, con-trasted with phenomenological truth,

66, 69; truth, Heidegger’s doubts con-cerning, 67–68; thought, 1,; thought,and Heidegger, 1, 17, 24, 125

Truth: a posteriori, 5, 112; absolute, 75,255n8.35; and being, 63ff; as disclosed-ness, 8, 44, 63; clearing, 70; correspon-dence and bivalence necessary, 72, 73;definition by Thomas Aquinas, 74; dou-ble, 149; essence of, 108; eternal, 6, 74;existential truth, 49; happening of, 112,124; Heidegger on, 64, 68, 72, 74, 245n5.5,246n5.8, 246n5.10; Kant’s view of, 85–86;Nietzsche’s view of, 74, 85–87; norma-tive and pseudonormative, 45; not with-out understanding, 74; objective andnihilism, 87; of being, 63, 68, 69, 70, 71;ontological, 45; presupposes the world,147; propositional, 8, 45; scientific pur-suit of, 6, 8; synthetic a priori, 111; tran-scendental, 8; trans-subjectivity of, 82

Truth that prevails, 9, 65, 68, 71Tugendhat, Ernst, 8, 9, 45, 47, 64; circular-

ity in Heidegger’s account of truth, 64Turning, the (Kehre, die), 2, 63ff, 76, 126,

128, 259n9.16

Ultimate foundation (Letztbegründung), 136Ultimate sense (letzter Sinn), 136Uncovering, 129, 275n13.22Understanding (Verstehen): and conscience,

61; and imagination, 219; and interpreta-tion, 12, 14, 113; and representation, 155;and synthetic a priori, 105; as absorbedcoping, 17, 21; as activity, 17; as existen-tial structure of Dasein, 51; as manage-ment, 12; as preconceptual, 16; as un- orpreconscious dealing with the world, 12;basic sources of, 33; categories of, 28;circle of, 109, 254n8.23; experience, 88,106; inexplicit nature, 12; Kantian, 23;necessary for truth, 74; nonthematic na-ture, 12; possibility of, 105; projective,108; pure concepts of, 28; putting intowords (hermeneutics), 24; roots of(Stämme), 33; synthesis of, 19, 155

Understanding of being (Seinsversständnis),3, 5, 8, 44, 61, 118, 177, 178, 185, 201;bipolar structure, 177; contextually a pri-ori, 118; not taken from experience, 108;pre-ontological, 218

Unfolding, 71

308 Index

Unity: and experiential data, 19, 219; of ap-perception, 34, 37, 44; of apperception,precedence over categories, 38, 216; ofself, 84, 85; of temporality, 19, 20, 216,220–21; of world, 132, 133

Urstiftung, see Philosophy, primaryestablishment

Valence, 9, 71Validity: horizon of, 136, 141, 203, 206; of

judgments (Gültigkeit), 34Verantwortlich (answerable), 55, 59Verfallen, see FallingVernehmen, das, see Taking a thing inVerticality of transcendence, rooted in

Christian dogmatics, 81von Hartmann, Eduard, 171; transcendental

realism, 171von Humboldt,Wilhelm, 5Vorgriff, see ForeconceptionVorhabe, see ForehavingVorsicht, see ForesightVorstruktur, see ForestructureVulgar time, 102

Wasgehalt, see QuiddityWay of ideas, 36, 37, 39; rejection of in

Husserl, 39What-being (essentia), 96; morphe and eidos, 97Wesensschau, 135Williams, Bernard, 243n4.36

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 76, 83, 87, 172, 175,176; external world, 169; logical space,87; meaning and words, 183; On Cer-tainty, 172, 175, 176; restricted under-standing in Tractatus, 83; submergence of subject and logos, 76

Work of art: as world-opening, 119; notrepresentational, 119

Worumwillen, see For-the-sake-of-whichWorld: as always experienced, 147; as ulti-

mate horizon, 146–47; being of the, 137;happening of, 131; holistic significanceof (Bedeutsamkeit), 183; nature of, 121,123, 147; relational, as, 122, 123; tran-scending consciousness, as, 40, 141; unityof, 132, 133, 147

World-bracketing, 7, 141, 173World-disclosure, 112, 119, 120, 129World-entry, 193World-involved, 7World picture, age of, 87World time, 102Worlding of world, 120, 124, 125, 130Worldview philosophy, 21

Zahavi, Dan, 144Zeitlichkeit, die, see TemporalityZuckert, Rachael, ix, 4–5, 215–31Zuhandenheit, see Ready-to-handZwingli, Ulrich, and verticality of tran-

scendence, 81

Index 309

Transcendental Heidegger

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